Excellent Cadavers

by Alexander Stille

The title of your next book comes from the phrase Cadaveri Eccellenti – used to describe high-profile mafia victims. Please tell us more.

Alexander Stille is an American-Italian journalist and this is a remarkable piece of journalism. It’s a narrative of the investigations of Falcone and Borsellino from the crucial years of the 1980s – when the Sicilian mafia was filling the streets of Palermo with bodies – right up to their murder in 1992. It’s an extraordinary and passionate piece of journalism about the most dramatic and important moment in the history of organised crime in Italy. You can’t get a better witness to it than Alexander Stille. There are relatively few books on the mafia by outsiders – if one can really call Stille an outsider – that become classics in Italy, and this is one of them.

 Stille puts the story of the Sicilian mafia in the context of postwar Italian politics, doesn’t he?

That’s right. The remarkable parallel narrative to the story of Falcone and Borsellino is of course the end of the Cold War and the virtual collapse of the Italian political system. The parties that had ruled Cold War Italy – the Communists and the Christian Democrats – folded and a new political reality emerged from the chaos of mafia bombs and corruption scandals. It was a very dramatic time and Stille is very good at placing things in that wider political context.

I have to add that the title of Stille’s book has always annoyed me. No one ever says “excellent cadavers” in English – it’s just not a very good translation. It really should be “Eminent Cadavers” or “Eminent Corpses”. But that one small problem aside, it’s a fantastic book.