I'M STILL ALIVE

In this graphic memoir, Saviano chronicles how a book he wrote about organized crime forced him into hiding.

In 2006, author Saviano published Gomorrah, an account of the violent war between Camorra Mafia clans in Casal di Principe, Italy. He intended his illumination of organized crime, “a dictatorship within a democracy,” as a “journalistic novel” inspired by writers like Albert Camus and Truman Capote. The book achieved great success and its author, considerable notoriety, but it also transformed his life in much darker ways. He faced intimidation and death threats by criminal elements who were offended by his exposé, and he was forced into police protection. Stringent security protocols were put into place; they were meant to only last weeks but instead went on for an interminable 15 years. Eventually, the author left his homeland for the United States to teach at New York University and was assigned a new identity for his protection. In harrowing detail, Saviano details the various plots to assassinate him that were uncovered and the increasing psychological effects of his forced isolation. In place of literary celebrity, he was saddled with “absolute solitude and plaguing bureaucratic complexity.” Every aspect of his quotidian existence became a challenge, from taking walks and dating to seeking medical assistance. It was a torturous predicament poignantly captured in these pages: “It’s like living in an aquarium: everyone is looking at me. And I look back, but from behind glass. I hold my breath and I keep thinking that as long as the things I want to do outnumber the things I’m not allowed to, I can handle it. Who knows if it’s true.” However, the tone of Saviano’s book can be cloyingly theatrical at times (“You bastards, I’m still alive!”). One sees a similar heavy-handedness in Hanuka’s overwrought illustrations—mostly grayscale with pops of color—that accompany the story. Still, this is a powerful tale of moral corruption and the cost of one’s resistance to it.

A sometimes-affecting remembrance about the wages of opposing evil hampered by uneven execution.