Andrej Longo’s collection is (of course) ten short stories
each loosely based on one of the ten commandments. The first being “I am the
Lord thy God, thou shalt have no other Gods before me”, is where we first meet
the “Mafia” boss Giggino Mezzanotte and understand the influence he has over
the City:
And from out of the dark comes
Giggino Mezzanotte. All dressed up and smiling away. With his polished shoes
and his jacket thrown over his arm. Along with two half-naked women, and
bodyguards like mountains.
He puts his hand on my elbow,
calm as anything.
‘Everything OK, son?’ he says.
The guy with the mirrored glasses
puts his knife in his pocket. His two friends do the same. Without a word they
go back inside the club.
“Thou shalt not take the name of the Lord thy God in vain”
is the story of a failed tenor singer who let the high and fast life take
control and his cocaine habits forced him to cross the bosses. Of course there
are dramatic consequences. “remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” covers
the lonely life of a woman who only sees her partner on Tuesday’s, due to his
long working hours. “Honour thy father and thy mother” is a heart wrenching
tale of the youngest son dealing with an invalid parent.
“Thou shalt not kill” is a father’s lament over the damaged
relationship he has with his young seven year old son:
I don’t know how much a
seven-year-old really understands. Je nodded and gave me a big hug. And as he
was hugging me, with his heart beating fast inside his chest, I could feel the
cold gun pressing into my thighs, and I realise I couldn’t do anything more for
him. My one hope was that he never became like me. My only hope.
“Thou shalt not commit adultery” is a young girls horrific
tale of her relationship with her father, “Thou shalt not steal” a confession
by a young boy who can not talk to his friends about a crime he has committed.
“Thou shalt not bear false witness” a stolen Mercedes, “Thou shalt not covet
thy neighbour’s wife” the story of a young bride to be on the morning of her
wedding and finally “”thy shalt not covet anything that is thy neighbour’s”
where three young hooligans steal a car and then pay the consequences.
As you can probably gather, the ten stories are interlinked
with the seedy side of Milan being the flow throughout. Short, sharp prose
that is easy to read, this is a collection that can be read in a single sitting.
At 150 pages and with large spacing and short paragraphs this is a brief encounter
with Andrej Longo’s work. All of the stories are tight and I like the flow of
connections by styling them to come from various angles (parent, child,
hoodlum, victim etc.). Personally I don’t think it will be a collection that I’ll
recall reading in 12 months time, and one of the usual criticisms I feel for
the shorter genre is that I just start to engage with a character and they’re
gone, and in this case that happened all too frequently. Overall an enjoyable but
light read, nothing that offended me, but a collection I feel won’t make the short list just given the
strength of other works this year.
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