London.
The final speaker in this Transforming Audiences session is Floriana Bernardi; her focus is on the role of the audience for Roberto Saviano's book Gomorrah, a book on the mafia which was published in Italy 2006 and has been translated into some 40 languages (possibly the first such books to reach a large international audience). Gomorrah focusses on the banal everyday business of the mafia, rather than glorifying (or emotionally denouncing) the criminal life. It confronts the omertà - the resigned silence which prevents citizens from speaking out against the influence of the mafia on everyday Italian life.
Discussions around Gomorrah on Amazon focus largely on the quality of the English translation (with many US-based readers feeling lost in translation as they struggle to understand the internal logic of the book and fail to cope with its level of detail), but several positive comments also point to the transformation of the audience around the book. Such reviews highlight the feeling of breathlessness in the face of frustration with the mafia's stranglehold on everyday Italian life which permeates the book; for Saviano, writing is a means of change.
Emerging from this is a cybertext made up of several Websites which focus more of less continuously on continuing Gomorrah's work; one such site is OltreGomorra, 'Beyond Gomorrah'. The site aims to create a database of mafia activities and reports, and thus to deconstruct the mafia myth and encourage and mobilise a critical citizenship. The book has galvanised its audience, in other words, but now this audience are taking the process of struggling against mafia influence forward in their own right (and take the focus off Saviano himself, who now lives under permanent police protection). But, Floriana suggests, it is also necessary to take this audience-driven process even further forward by injecting institutional support and funding into this project.
