TINA, MAFIA SOLDIER, Striking New Sicilian Crime Fiction from Maria Rosa Cutrufelli

The opening chapters of TINA, MAFIA SOLDIER go very slowly, as the narrator—would-be author of a biography of Cettina, now Tina, a Mafia youth—renews her acquaintance with Gela, a city in Sicily. This harsh frontier-like city, once a coveted location in ancient history, is now a battered orphan of the petrochemical industry. Its historic face has vanished; instead, the narrator sees it as "Young and cruel. It's a cruel landscape that I find hard to recognize and doesn't correspond to the map of my memory anymore."

The city itself reeks of masculine violence and brutality. But embedded in it today is Tina, a' masculidda, Tina the little tomboy, documented in a folder the narrator carries with her. Recently imprisoned, Tina isn't yet 20 years old, but her leadership of her small teen gang within the Mafia culture has brought her strength and notoriety.

The quest for Tina herself begins with interview upon interview of relatives and friends of this "Mafia soldier" in hopes of gaining a visit with the prisoner, who can choose whether or not to admit someone, almost a bizarre form of royalty. And in fact, Tina is a figure worth admiring, even worshiping, with her motorbike, her weapons, the loyalty she's demanded and inspired.

Bear with this narrator and the translation (by Robin Pickering-Jazzi), because the discomfort of the chapters builds toward an awkward yet compelling understanding of Tina herself and the "cruel" city that has brought her into being. A sexual intermediate, neither muscled male nor seductive female, Tina is a quintessential "other," trans in every aspect of her being.

Here is a taste of Tina, struggling to outwait the customers at the beauty salon operated by her cousin Giovanna:

The roots of her bad mood sank down into embedded realities that were different and deeper than dissatisfaction or unfulfilled needs. She would have liked to make a spectacular entrance that day. She dreamed of the splendor of an entrance worthy of her. The Alfa 164 and black leather jacket. ... "Did you all see her? Rambo." Constraining her to give tough answers, always poised on a razor's edge.

Then there's Tina's friend Graziella, who works for a production company and represents another side of the muddled sexuality and violence of the place:

Graziella is a nervous brunette who's going back and forth between a printer and a video, extricating herself from snarls of wires that are hanging down and getting entangled between stools and tables, obviously hindering her movements. But more than her exuberant nature, I think it's her still very young age that makes her easily confront a job whose dangers she doesn't see, even though she knows perfectly well what they are, and complain about the job just being temporary.

Though men are interviewed too, it's the women who love Tina for herself and would do anything for her. Giovanna, for instance, "raises the cigarette to her mouth, a darting little snake with a pointed tip, and says as she exhales the smoke, 'She's a warrior.' A reverential fear that gradually dissolves in veiled disapproval."

By the time our narrator finally forms a connection with Tina herself, the grim, assaultive, and sexually confusing journey into the teenager's life, into the Cosa Nostra, into Sicily and its asphyxiative presence, has changed her irretrievably. What she will facilitate at last for Tina will tear apart the fabric she has spent so much time and effort crafting, as she calls Tina out of the cell and into compelling pages.

TINA, MAFIA SOLDIER is complex, with seductive metaphors and a grimly poisonous atmosphere that daunts the emergence of any necessary self-love. Once it picks up speed, it's compelling and potent. There can be no return to any mythic Sicily after this fictive immersion in reality provided by Sicilian-born Maria Rosa Cutrufelli.

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