Write about the most angular aspects of our society. Telling from the edges of a supposedly oval world to end up discovering those hurtful surfaces of our reality.
Roberto Saviano combines his literary vocation with his journalistic will. And in the mix we enjoy an extremely controversial author who tackles any new argument in his books on the cutting edge. From the verisimilitude of the facts to the subjective vision that complements and projects what is narrated to that feeling of reality like a skin to inhabit.
It cannot be ignored that his literary and journalistic career was launched by his iInvestigation of a Camorra that even today he may have in his sights for daring to investigate them and to put such profound aspects of their nature black on white.
But from that first Gomorrah book research on the mafia (an argument that Saviano returns to regularly), many other works have come later to build a career as a writer that continues to attract the attention of readers around the world.
In fact, in my selection I will deliberately ignore "Gomorrah" to analyze everything that came afterwards beyond the noise of the necessary work that revealed very crude realities. Only in this way can we analyze the writer beyond his main legacy.
Top 3 recommended books by Roberto Saviano
Fierce kiss
We land in the first place in the most open work of fiction by a Saviano who to this day sees with a certain comfortable distance those intense days of investigations on the camorra.
Because from the knowledge of everything that is going on in the capital of this organization, a Naples from which Saviano also comes, documentaries, essays and also novels could be written. And on this occasion everything is based on fictional scenarios, replicated from that underworld, yes, which supports the dark functioning of certain powers dominated by mafias.
The first part of this novel was "The Children's Band", which I will quote below. But contrary to what is usually thought, sometimes the second parts, because necessary, reach a higher level of narrative intensity. There is no story about the Camorra that does not require subsequent revenge or some type of amendment in which even the most sinister poetic justice can prevail.
Of course, power in the underworld, among institutionalized rather than organized crime, can reach unimaginable levels of pettiness. Except that Saviano is capable of outlining, in a miserable world, those traces of humanity that fly over the filth.
And this is how we find emotion and confidence in the human being determined to seek the light between vanities, violence, power, corruption, drugs and all the destruction of the world disguised as feigned mafia moral standards.
The boys band
Obtaining cum laude registration in the field of knowledge of the mafias and their organized crime systems, surviving the process, remains in the hands of a few. Among those who infiltrated the mafia, specifically the Italian Camorra, and lived to tell about it, highlights Roberto Saviano.
In the case of book The boys band, this author goes to the side of fiction to transmit everything experienced in that particular underworld, with that committed intention of someone who needs to expose to the world hidden realities that end up reaching the most unexpected spaces of power.
But behind (or inside) every criminal organization, we always find the necessary small partners, those young people recruited for the cause and who leave their skin on the streets, all for a feeling of belonging and some money that ends up reverting back to the organization. organization.
The protagonists of this story are those boys from Naples, par excellence, but from any other city by extension (the problem is the same). Ten young people lead us on the wild side of life. They are boys who one day look into the abyss of supposedly easy money (although it may eventually cost their own life), drugs, apparent luxuries and belonging to a clan.
They all want to keep moving up in the organization. Nicolas Fiorillo is its visible head, and among all they fear their neighborhoods of influence. They are barely teenagers, but they have known how to find a clan to which they remain loyal and in which they try to thrive in whatever way.
Violence, the roar of small motorcycles that roam freely through the streets, blood, shady businesses and the empty hope of an easy life towards a splendid future. Respect through weapons and a certain condescension from the authorities. The minority as a shield against the law but not against death. Endings that break their hopes and glory for the one who can survive that so-called easy life.
An interesting novel with completely truthful overtones. Highly recommended to delve into parallel realities about the small lackeys who serve the big mafias.
Zero zero zero
A book that reminded me in different phases of another famous French boom Frederic beigbeder, his work "13,99«. The nexus of union, cocaine, the drug of success that triggers the ego of its user towards that feeling of the almighty, until the subsequent fall that ends up leading to this type of consumption.
The vision of reality proposed by Beigbeder or Saviano is based on that paradoxical maximum capacity, that exploration of the limits of creativity triggered by chemical interaction. Cocaine and the fascinating sensation of control from a point of depersonalization that projects the user into a new friendly world.
But deep down the price is also known and perhaps there are those who are willing to pay it, until the final moment of making it effective in which it may be discovered that the soul has no balance with which to pay the ego's outstanding bills.
From a sociological phenomenon point of view, Saviano analyzes the effects but also follows the complete traceability of trafficking, the black market from origin to final consumer.
