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The Neapolitan paradox — grandeur, community and spirituality coexisting with poverty, crime and amorality — has informed some wonderful literature, from Norman Lewis’s wartime memoir Naples ’44 to the bestselling books of Elena Ferrante.
But reading Francesca Maria Benvenuto’s remarkable debut novel, So People Know It’s Me, I was reminded of “The Incident at Naples”, an essay by Francis Steegmuller, in which the American author and translator recalls being mugged in the city in 1983. The awful violence was countered by the “unhesitating human solidarity” shown by locals. The narrator of Benvenuto’s short sharp tale is Zeno Iaccarino, a 15-year-old scippatore (the kind of scooter-riding bandits who targeted Steegmuller), who is now serving time for murder in Nisida, an island prison for minors in the Gulf of Naples.
Set in the winter of 1991, the novel takes the form of Zeno’s diary, written for his prison teacher, Ms Martina, a trusted and caring woman he refers to simply as “Teach”. His reward will be a 48-hour Christmas furlough, during which he can visit his mother, a prostitute who raised him on her own in shocking deprivation. “In Forcella, we lived in a real zuzzuso shithole,” writes Zeno. “Can’t really call it an apartment.” Their home has a bed, two chairs, a table. No window. The furniture is owned by a loan shark.
A sad, predictable trajectory is traced: taken under the wing of one of his mother’s clients, Zeno starts bag-snatching and dealing in “baggies” of drugs. His success draws the attention of a rival gang, who dispatch another teenager on a moped to gun him down. But Zeno gets in first. “I fired three times, just sorta at him and he fell over, all bloody . . . but they caught me cause everybody saw me — it was morning.”
Softer aspects emerge. Zeno writes about his girlfriend — “The two of us, we’d walk holding hands, like grownups do when they’re together” — and tentative bonds with fellow prisoners, such as “Gaetano the Innocent”, who has taken the blame for an adult’s crime in exchange for a fee. We learn that he feels hemmed in by the sea, that he’d like to be an explorer and “see a bunch of beautiful places”. In these moments, his age, his innocence, appears. “I’m young but I’m also kinda old.”
The narrative voice is credible, filtered through Elizabeth Harris’s well-judged translation from the Italian. Zeno’s character, as an adolescent who uses bravado to conceal his pain, materialises courtesy of what is unstated as much as what is divulged. He often struggles with his capacity to communicate his situation.
The story is partly inspired by the author’s mother, who worked as a teacher at the real juvenile detention centre on Nisida. Benvenuto, who was born in Naples and is now a Paris-based criminal lawyer, has a keen, professional understanding of the myriad causes of crime and the problems of punitive punishments. Moving and thought-provoking, the novel deserves to appear on prize lists. It captures, with effective brevity, a city of splendour and squalor and a childhood curtailed.
So People Know It’s Me by Francesca Maria Benvenuto, translated by Elizabeth Harris, Pushkin Press £12.99, 160 pages
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