Gomorra
Roberto Saviano
Mondadori, Coll. “Strade
Blu” • 2006 • 334 pages
Giancarlo Pagani
Translation: Karen Vincent-Jones
Giancarlo Pagani lives in Piacencza. Passionate about literature,
and expert connaisseur of the novel, not just crime novels and thrillers,
he is the author of the novel Il diavolo
non profuma di zolfo, (The
Devil Does Not Smell of Sulphur ) Ed. Libreria dell'orso, 2004,
and of numerous short stories that have appeared in magazines and
anthologies.
This
book should have a sticker on it, not with the number of copies
sold but with a warning: “This book may seriously damage your indifference”.
Because that's what this book does : Gomorra challenges
the indifference, the detachment and the lack of interest felt by
Italians towards anything that happens in the South. It is not really
a novel, but nor is it a report. It's a kind of transexual … a
social and anthropological writing mutation. This book leaves its
mark, unlike most books of recent years. I would put it alongside
Giancarlo De Cataldo's Roman criminel
(Crime Novel).
These two are a new kind of book, and
they are important because they use the characteristic features
of the thriller, the climaxes, the suspense, the long passages
of dialogue (traditionally avoided), a feverish search for detail,
and a new kind of detective, and try to tell us about the real
world. To explain it. By creating literature. If you still want
to call them « crime thrillers»,
no-one's stopping you.
The first image in Gomorra sets
the tome: Chinese heads splattering on the concrete benches of
the port of Naples , rolling out of a container that comes open.
The sound of ripe watermelons bursting. Unforgettable. I'm not
interested in whether this actually happened, or if Saviano was
there or if he saw it with his own eyes. What does interest me
is that I'll never forget it ; and every
time I read or see some boring news item on Naples , I will think
of this image and I will see the world slightly- OK, very slightly-
differently.
And this is what the modern, post-James
Elroy thriller is about. Because if you dig down, if you unearth
the mystery with your hands, and tell the story in the way that
crime thrillers have always done, you find society's darker side.
The one that everyone conceals because it isn't convenient… the
side we'd rather keep our distance from. And it's changing.
Gomorra-Transexual does this by means of a cinematic writing
technique in which images are visual bombs. And the book tells us
about this perverse short-circuit between the criminal mentality,
so-called reality-based fiction, and criminality itself, which creates
its own self-image through fiction. When you've only ever been a
criminal, it's difficult having a lot of money and not knowing what
to do with it...
This is a complex way of explaining
the chapter entitled « Hollywood »,
where Saviano tells the story of a crime boss who has had built for
him a villa identical in every respect to Tony Montana's villa in Scarface -
the same control room with banks of computer screens, the bathroom
with twin washbasins surmounted by a lion's head. The villa that,
of course, never existed in real life, because it was only a Hollywood
set, but it was still a gangster's dream home. And this villa- the
real one- had been built only a mile from an illegal toxic waste
dump, because when you live that kind of life only the present counts,
and the risk the boss was taking living next to that cancerous smoke
just didn't bother him... a crime boss's life is inevitably short.
Thanks to Saviano's barefaced nerve,
and also his use of the names of real people, we are immediately
plunged into the feeling that what we are reading is not pages
but flesh, and blood, pink 500 euro notes and plastic packets of
cocaine ; even more than in the
most aggressive and frenetic thriller.
These eleven chapters describe a world
that we thought was just a television cliché. Just when everybody is agreed that investigative
journalism is dead and buried, Saviano, instead of recounting the
tribulations of a group of idle young people from rich families who
smoke dope, spend their time meditating, have a different girlfriend
every night, but are in love with the only girl who doesn't have
time for them (but don't worry, in the last-but-one scene she'll
change her mind), describes a way of thinking that shrouds everything
in a kind of fog, those fine particles that really scare us. You
have to get money. A lot of money. Always more money. It doesn't
matter where, or how. It doesn't matter where, so long as it's all
of it, right now. Whether you belong to the world of smuggling or
high (not to mention low…) fashion and its tricks or if you're going
off to fight in a suddenly-declared war with few rules about who
can join up, whether you're a man or a woman, the rules are the same,
and reinforced concrete is the soundest currency.
His conclusion and his message are clear. He states overtly that
the Camorra (with a capital C) is not a gang but a system. And its
logic, the logic of criminal enterprises and the gangster mentality,
coincides with the logic of the most advanced neo-liberal capitalism.
Read this book, just as you read Roman Criminel, and Naples
will never be the same again.
