I'm surprised I even remember the amazing experience of reading Mario Puzo's The Godfather. It's been a couple months since I finished it and I didn't get around to posting the many things I liked about it due to the third quarter's poetry blogging. I enjoyed reading W.H. Auden and having to break down his works, but I ended up forgetting to write about The Godfather.
I don't know where to start because nearly every part of the book was great in its own way. I will definitely use this on the A.P. Lit exam's open-ended question if I can.
Like most people I saw the movies ( the first two; the third one doesn't count!) before reading Puzo's book. They were truly great movies (the first one was number 3 on A.F.I.'s top 100 movies), which convinced me that the book they were based on must be great too if Francis Ford Coppola was able to make two landmark films out of it (it helped to have Puzo as his other screenwriter). That was what got me started on the book and I was glad that I finished it because Coppola left many parts out, which makes sense.
The novel didn't seem like a novel at all, that was how good a portrayal of the Italian Mafia it was. It is known that Puzo did base the book off of a Mafia crime family that did control New York in the early 1900's, but that does not detract from its awesomeness. Sadly one of the aspects of The Godfather I liked the most was its graphic nature (the horse head in Jack Woltz's bed was crazy). This leads me to discuss the killings. This was the best part of the story by far. Everything was described as if it really happened.
Even though I knew the plot very well from having seen the movies so many times, I liked reading the back stories of certain characters (Luca Brazi was not given enough time on the screen!). It was also interesting to find out that most of the second movie was not in the book, but rather was created by Coppola and Puzo in order to continue Michael Corleone's story. The text itself ends with Michael in Nevada with Kay and his children and one is unsure if things fall apart between them or not. Without writing another book, Puzo uses The Godfather: Part II to show how Don Michael uses his power and to show what he loses by being a mobster.
Overall I love The Godfather because it never lost my interest as a reader. I knew the entire story but was not bored even for a second. All of the characters were well-developed and the narrator followed most of them until they died. Even the minor characters were explored in just as many pages as the major ones. I would recommend this book to all those that want a story with action, betrayal, and an unhappy ending.
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