And So It Goes

At the moment, I'm reading Mattanza: Love and Death in the Sea of Sicily by Theresa Maggio (I seem to be on a bit of a Mediterreanean kick, perhaps inspired by a friend of mine who, about now, should be kicking around the Greek Isles -- Hello, Lara, if you're reading this!), a book about the fishermen and people of a small Sicilian island called Favignana and their centuries-old ritual of bluefin tuna slaughter called mattanza.

It's more romance than reportage, as Maggio tries to capture the life, rhythm, rituals, myths, and, yes, romance of life on the island, centering her story on the fishermen who deploy the nets and traps that gather hundreds of the giant bluefins for slaughter. The tuna once made the island prosperous, but declining numbers of fish and competition from long-line trawlers has taken its toll (the island's cannery closed in 1981, throwing a thousand people out of work), and soon the ritual of the mattanza will probably disappear from Favignana, leaving pretty much nothing but tourism behind.

There is a Japan connection: it's Japan's voracious appetite for sashimi that's helping keep the mattanza going: when the bluefin tuna are slaughtered, the Japanese are waiting to send them off to the tuna auction at giant Tsukiji Wholesale Market in Tokyo. Maggio includes a rather over-the-top chapter about Japanese sushi, exaggerating (in my opinion) the ritual and price of sushi: she quotes 10-year-old Bubble-Era prices for tuna (in 1992, she says, a 715-pound bluefin was sold for $83,500, or about $117 a pound) and extrapolates from that, despite the fact that the average price is a very small fraction of that peak.

The kind of highly stylized sushi places she describes, where they sell toro for $75 a plate, are places I've never set foot in and probably never will: I go to the far more common, far more plebian kaiten zushi (conveyor belt sushi) restaurants, where I can snarf down maguro and torofor about $1 to 2 a plate. Sure, the fish isn't the highest quality, the atmosphere is utilitarian, and the wasabi is reconstituted from powder, but it's still tasty and, I think, a more usual experience than the romantic and ritualistic kind Maggio describes.

I like the book, I must say. Maybe I'll tackle the Lawrence Durell book on my shelf next.