Godfather, The Read Free

first act as “a man of respect” to save a widow and her dog from the nefarious greed of an evil landlord. About to be evicted from her apartment, Signora Columbo, as a poor woman, has no recourse to the usual channels of authority. It will, in fact, be the police who will put her out of the building if she doesn’t leave voluntarily. She comes to Vito’s house to ask for help and he arranges it: same rent as before and the yapping dog stays.

    The Don’s role as a Lone Ranger becomes legendary, as evidenced years later at the wedding that opens the book. We first meet Don Corleone, in fact, in his role as a fixer of problems, not as a mobster. A trio of protagonists, each with a personal difficulty, appeals to the Don for help, which he will deliver with colorful effectiveness. His philosophy—on the surface based on friendship and neighborly barter, like that of a country doctor who is paid in chickens or fresh produce—has a certain American appeal:

    Don Vito Corleone was a man to whom everybody came for help, and never were they disappointed. He made no empty promises, nor the craven excuse that his hands were tied by more powerful forces in the world than himself. It was not necessary that he be your friend, it was not even important that you had no means with which to repay him. Only one thing was required. That you, you yourself , proclaim your friendship. And then, no matter how poor or powerless the supplicant, Don Corleone would take that man’s troubles to his heart. And he would let nothing stand in the way to a solution to that man’s woe. His reward? Friendship, the repectful title of “Don,” and sometimes the more affectionate saluation of “Godfather.” And perhaps, to show respect only, never for profit, some humble gift—a gallon of homemade wine or a basket of peppered taralles specially baked to grace his Christmas table. It was understood, it was mere good manners, to proclaim that you were in his debt and that he had the right to call upon you at any time to redeem your debt by some small service. (p. 11)

    Don Corleone’s ability to deliver implies that he is not just the Godfather, but in fact God. In his son Michael’s assessment, “He takes everything personal. Like God. He knows every feather that falls from the tail of a sparrow or however the hell it goes” (p.138).

    Of course, we know that the activities of the Corleone family are not good ones. We know that ultimately a system like theirs cannot take the place of laws and courts, and we need look no farther than the Don’s hometown for evidence of this. By the time he left Corleone as a child, the village was tormented by violence, danger, and feuds brought on by the Mafia, which served as the village’s “second government, far more powerful than the official one in Rome” (p.183). The techniques Vito Corleone continues in America are the very ones that made it necessary for him to leave Sicily.

    But still, on a purely visceral level, there is something oddly attractive about the world presented in The Godfather and about the ubiquitous control over that world that the Corleone family holds. In 1969, this must have been a striking fantasy to readers who felt that the traditional institutions of power and authority in America were seriously in question. Or to today’s readers, for that matter. Deep in our hearts we probably all long for the ability to mete out swift and effective justice to those over whom we have no power. We may all know someone we’d like to see sleeping with a horse’s head, if not with the fishes. In our popular stories, we continue to want a Western hero, but not a sanitized one. The Godfather was a modern story, in which the dark side and justice were elided and confused.

     
    THE GODFATHER SPENT nearly seventy weeks on bestseller lists, and more than twenty million copies of the book have been sold. Many more people know of the story, however, through its first two film adaptations, both of