The lower depths

At 13, walking to school, Saviano saw a car with a man’s legs sticking out of the front side-window. He had been turned upside down by the force of machine-gun bullets. When the police pulled the dead man out, an erection was poking through his torn clothes. The young Saviano stared, fascinated...

It seems that deeper even than the scandal of the Camorra, for Saviano, is the scandal of death itself. ‘Having seen dozens of murdered men, spattered with blood and dirt, giving off disgusting smells, corpses met by onlookers with curiosity or professional indifference, or kicked aside like toxic waste or wept over in desperation, I have grasped only one thing for sure, an idea so basic it seems dumb: death stinks.’

-- Tim Parks reviews Gomorrah: Italy’s Other Mafia by Roberto Saviano