fate in a football field – Corriere.it

A Super Santos rolls on the pavement. Four kids are chasing the legendary “orange fire ball with black stripes, rigorously misaligned”: their names are Dario, Giovanni, Giuseppe and Rino. They are playing the usual afternoon match, in the suburban square where they live, between a giant statue of Jesus and the queue of junkies waiting for a dose. Heroin, cocaine, crack. A scene of normal everyday life, even for kids who are just over ten years old. What the four friends don’t know is that, while they run and have fun, they are also chasing their own destiny. They won’t grab it. Because no one ever beats luck, especially if you were born between saittelle – in Neapolitan: the slits of the sidewalks wide open on the sewers – and the streets where the clans rage. Criminal domination is at its peak, it grows out of all proportion with drug trafficking, the only welfare for the people of the neighborhood.

The map that Roberto Saviano gives to the reader in his new novel Pure heart, out November 9 (Giunti, pages 168, euro 16), it carries the imprinting of places and dynamics between characters that made the Neapolitan writer famous. To read it against the light and in depth, stretching the gaze beyond the Camorra anthropology, it is a story with an unprecedented narrative device and an engaging rhythm, which drags the reader into a whirlpool of bewilderment and emotions, a journey in depth through the best. and the worst that the human being has to offer for the theater of life. The book was born from the rewriting of Super Santosa story that the author under escort had published in 2005, before the success of Gomorrah, in a collection edited by Alessandro Leogrande for L’Ancora del Mediterraneo, which appeared several times in recent years, including for the editions of the Corriere della Sera. Until the recent decision to rewrite it, as Saviano himself declares in the introduction, to create “a wider excursion, swimming on the surface of the carefree that that fire orange rubber balloon transmits and plunging me into the depths of certain Neapolitan places where life too often gets stuck”.

From the initial game scheme that the author offers the reader to orient himself among the moral and social dross that frame the existence of the four friends with a passion for football, a narrative structure unfolds in two balanced halves – childhood from street urchins and the adult life, integrated with the clan, of the protagonists – which page after page composes a waltz round with a fast rhythm and a last breath, in which the reader will feel a crescendo of danger under the skin: turn the page, in the story of Saviano, it’s like turning those dark corners of Naples behind which no one can predict what will be waiting for you. A brutal event, crudeness of life, urban violence. When the boss of the Tonino district called “Porcello” – in reality he even wrote it to us on his identity card that he was a pig, our people will discover, in an epiphany at the good fellas – he will insert them in his grange game of drugs and death, taking advantage of their purity, paying them to play football and act as a “stake” for the drugstore he manages, everything has already been decided for our heroes.

But more than the criminal element, to unfold between the chapters with compact writing – Saviano implements the stylistic choice of a binary and direct prose, like a heart that pumps blood and innervates the rest of the organism – it is the soul of the characters, the their perennial deviation from an already written destiny, the exception they represent in an immutable and cruel context. Dario, Giovanni, Giuseppe and Rino. They don’t know they’ve crossed the threshold, they do not know that they passed it at birth, to be born where they were born, to be children of who the children are, for daring to dream of one day wearing the colors of their beloved team. The game and its ecstasy, a heart as big as a neighborhood wide open to welcome the pulsations of the beloved ball bouncing off the concrete.

More than towards Gomorrah And The paranza of children, Pure heart turns his gaze to the roots of French naturalism, sinking down to Germinal by Émile Zola: there are mechanisms to such an extent oiled in our society, where the accumulation and arrogance of money is so brutal, that the individual is now deprived of his free will. But the vanquished are no better than those who defeated them, and not even childhood acts as a membrane that can protect you from the aggression of corruption. A corrupt man is the exact opposite of a pure heart. But when, Saviano seems to ask himself, has purity become dishonesty? Not towards the laws and the community, because that is only the ideological cover that the bourgeois world imposes on everyone else to continue doing its business, but the most feared: dishonesty towards oneself. When did we stop dreaming, of “tending, projecting, aspiring”?

There is a moment in the life of every teenager in the world, at any latitude and in any era, with a tragic and ferocious flavor. It is the once-in-a-lifetime moment when the ball stops rolling and your best friend vanishes, becoming a shadow that carries with it the ghost of the boys you have been and that you will never return. It is the instant when childhood fades, the last vibration before the shadow line, the betrayal of adulthood that the British playwright Ken Hill summarized in his theatrical adaptation of the Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux with the line: «Childhood is a promise that is never kept».

A shadow line which, as in Conrad, provides for the entrusting of a mission of great responsibility to a young person (in this case, to a group of young people) but which in Saviano’s book does not become the overcoming of the feeling of unworthiness for one’s own being, but rather for its acceptance. So our characters will find themselves having to take the last waltz step in the land from which it is no longer possible to go back. It is the second, whirling part of the novel. The one in which, as in a film by the Coen brothers, the Jewish idea of ​​an impotent humanity, of a meaningless history and of a thousand individual stories without a saving ending is manifested. Yet something remains: when the heart of flesh and blood makes its appearance on the scene, here is the possibility for Dario, Giovanni, Giuseppe and Rino to tear through with their individual choices the crack from which to let in the light, upset the balance and blow up the bank. Childhood is over and Super Santos doesn’t bounce anymore, but instead of him there is a pure heart that doesn’t want to stop beating.

The author and the firmcopie in Milan

«Pure heart. Four friends. Four fates. One Passion »by Roberto Saviano leaves Giunti on Wednesday 9 November. The novel (pp. 168, euro 16) is the rewrite of the short story “Super Santos” which appeared in the collection “The ball is round” of 2005 (published by Ancora del Mediterraneo), then released in 2011 as a separate volume for editions of the «Corriere della Sera» and, in 2012, in digital version by Feltrinelli. Saviano will sign copies of “Pure Heart” on Sunday 13 November in Milan (11.30 am) at the Feltrinelli in Piazza Duomo