Roberto Saviano's Gomorrah

"COSCO, the largest Chinese state-owned shipping company, with the world's third-largest fleet, operates in the port of Naples in consort with MSC, a Geneva-based company that owns the world's second-largest commercial fleet. The Swiss and Chinese decided to pool together and invest heavily in Naples, where they manage the largest cargo terminal. With over 3,000 feet of pier, nearly a million and a half square feet of terminal, and more than 300,000 square feet of outdoor space at their disposal, they absorb almost all the traffic in transit for Europe. You have to reconfigure your imagination to try to understand the port of Naples as the bottom rung of the ladder of Chinese production. The biblical image seems appropriate: the eye of the needle is the port, and the camel that has to pass through it are the ships. Enormous vessels line up single file out in the gulf and await their turn amid the confusion of pitching sterns and colliding bows; rumbling with heaving iron, the sheet metal and screws slowly penetrate the tiny Neapolitan opening. It is as if the anus of the sea were opening out, causing great pain to the sphincter muscles." (Roberto Saviano, Gomorrah, from The New York Times)

Read this book, now.

Read more: chapterr one, NYTimes review - here's a passage:

"Roberto Saviano, a young Italian journalist, counts the cost in “Gomorrah,” his savage indictment of the Neapolitan crime organization known as the Camorra. Although less well known than the Mafia, its Sicilian counterpart, the Camorra has held the economy of southern Italy in a tight grip for more than a century. With time it has adapted and modernized, spreading from Naples to outlying towns, while adding financial services and real estate to its expanding portfolio. “Never in the economy of a region has there been such a widespread, crushing presence of criminality as in Campania in the last 10 years,” Mr. Saviano writes. [...] Granted, it is a bewildering mess. The sheer scope of the Camorra’s businesses numbs even Mr. Saviano, who confesses to despair. Everything, he writes, seems to belong to the mob: “land, buffalos, farms, quarries, garages, dairies, hotels and restaurants" (William Grimes, The New York Times)

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