《当代美国非主流文学思想调研(英文版)》:
Since books were non-negotiable items in my community, the giving of them was considered not only impractical but taboo. Sometime, shortly after my father's death, my uncle Pasquale gave me a copy of Luigi Barzini's The Italians; he just handed it to me, without even a word, assuming through his glance, that I would know what to do with it. Back then I thought I knew too much about being Italian. But all I really knew was that being Italian meant being different from the ones I wanted to be like. The last thing in the world that I wanted at that age was to read about a group with which I no longer wished to be assoaated. I put the book on a shelf connected to my bed, the only shelf outside our kitchen; there it would lieunread for seven years. From then on I read nothing beyond my school assignments, One day-a day of no speaal occasion-one of my aunts again broke this book-as-gift taboo by giving my mother a copy of Mario Puzo's The Godfather; she told my mother that if her nephew was so intent on reading he might as well read a book about Italians (neither of them had read it of course). The htle of the book was quite appropriate since, due to my father s early death, I, at the age of ten, had been made godfather to one of my cousins. Perhaps that aunt thought it would make an appropriate handbook for my new role in the extended family.
In that book I encountered men like Amerigo Bonasera, the undertaker, Luca
Brasi, the street thug, and Johnny Fontaine, who were like the regulars I knew in the pawnshop. Some would come in with guns, jewelry and golf clubs to pawn. Men like these formed alliances in order to get things done. Because of its stock of familiar characters, The Godfather was the first novel with which I could completely identify.
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