Italian novel mirrors the horrifying reality of the modern criminal system.
“I am convinced that imprisonment is a way of pretending to solve the problem of crime. It does nothing for the victims of crime, but perpetuates the idea of retribution, thus maintaining the endless cycle of violence in our culture.” —Howard Zinn
On September 3, 2014, Henry Lee McCollum was released from North Carolina’s central prison after being on death row for 31 years. McCollum and his half brother Leon Brown, who was serving a life sentence related to the same case, were both released after a judge overturned their conviction in the 1983 rape and murder of an 11-year-old girl.
McCollum’s case has brought back media attention to capital punishment and America’s incarceration system, raising necessary questions about justice and the nature of forced confinement. As with other essential questions of the human condition, literature and the arts have always questioned justice and wondered what it means to be imprisoned. From ruthless novels such as The Family of Pascual Duarte and recent TV successes like Rectify and Orange Is the New Black, through classic movies like TheShawshank Redemption, American History X, and Dead Man Walking, these works have forced us to rethink the modern criminal justice system.
Like classic literary works about prison, the recent translation of Alessandro Perissinotto’s bestselling Italian novel For They Have Sown the Wind raises many of the same questions that the McCollum case did.
Incarcerated for the murder of his wife, Giacomo Musso declares his innocence in this sweeping story of prejudice and ill-fated love
{buybutton id=16271/}It was love, or perhaps misfortune, that led Giacomo Musso, a 35-year-old teacher, to incarceration in the maximum-security wing of the Novara penitentiary. He insists upon his innocence while the newspapers run photos of the mutilated corpse of his wife. Out of desperation, Giacomo tells the story of his life—that is, the series of events that inevitably led him to this cell.
Their marriage was not a red-hot love affair, but rather a passion that grew slowly and steadily—a love meant to last. He and his wife, Shirin, decided to move back to Molini, the town in the Piedmontese mountains where Giacomo was born. Shirin, raised in France after her family fled Iran, wanted the security of Giacomo’s roots. But even in Molini, she remained a foreigner, treated first with intrusive curiosity and then with mistrust. As Shirin becomes more isolated from the people around her, she grows increasingly distant from her husband. Before long, nothing is left of her or of their love, except for the memories Giacomo writes down in his diary in the hope that perhaps he can create a better ending to the story.