skopia
Henry Hill spent twenty-five years as a Lucchese associate, from stolen cigarettes to the Lufthansa robbery, and Pileggi lets him tell it himself. Scorsese lifted whole scenes of Goodfellas straight from it.
Tom narrates the St. Louis apartment he escaped, where his mother relives the seventeen gentlemen callers of her girlhood and his limping sister tends her glass animals. Everything turns on one visitor.
Passed over by her rich relations, a poor spinster sets out to ruin them, helped by a wife who bankrupts men for a living. Balzac makes envy a protagonist and never looks away.
In seventeenth-century Lombardy two peasants want to marry, and a lord who wants the bride frightens their priest into refusing. Riot, famine, and plague come between them. Italian prose was remade on it.