My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is one of those rare cases, where the movie is sooo much better than the book. I am angry with myself for wasting my time on this book, but it was solely my fault, or rather, my silly habit of finishing a book once I’ve started it. I should’ve thrown it away after the first 4 chapters. But then, I admit that there were two chapters that I skipped in the middle, because one of them was about the Don’s godson, a Hollywood celebrity who couldn’t do anything on his own (yes, the famous horse scene) and that 100-paged chapter went on and on about his boring life, his mediocre personality, and his uninteresting misfortunes about losing his voice and not getting movie roles. I couldn’t give a damn about Johnny Fontaine and his lousy existence, no matter what real-life celebrity he was supposedly copied from. What the hell was that character doing in a book about mafia?
The other chapter was about a woman with whom Sonny Corleone had an affair and her whole story was about her big vagina. Yes, you read it right. She had a very large vagina and that’s why the godly endowed Sonny (we read a lot about his size) made her feel good. Then she met a doctor who performed a surgery on her vagina... No, I’m not making this all up. This was in a book about mafia. A book on which are based two fantastic movies. This is where I have to thank F.F Coppola for shooting something so good based on a material so average and dull. The prose was boring, repetitive, lifeless. Sometimes it read like a draft, not a finished book. The characters were mere mannequins. And Puzo seemed to be in love with the character of the Godfather, because I lost the count of how many times he mentioned the Don’s “genius”. How many times in a single book can you say that the Don was pure genius, his ideas were genius, his actions were genius?
There were so many things wrong in this book, but I won’t be spending my time mentioning them. I better find something more interesting to read.
