Summary
ROBERTO Saviano is a man with a price on his head. As the author of Gomorrah (which was subsequently made into a celebrated film), he incurred the wrath of the Camorra mafia in Naples and for the past few years has had no option but to live peripatetically under police protection. Every move he makes must be carefully calibrated, every appointment vetted. He is not even able to go for a walk without bodyguards. A writer I know recalled attending a festival on an island off Italy at which Saviano was a guest. Even the guards looked anxious, he said, their eyes scanning frantically for signs of imminent attack. As Saviano himself is well aware, the safest- seeming places are potentially the most dangerous.
Beauty And The Inferno is a book of essays, some of which could have been written by any good writer. There is one, for example, on Isaac Bashevis Singer, the great Jewish novelist and short story writer, which shows what a perceptive and sympathetic critic and reader Saviano is. There is another, about Michael Herr's novel Dispatches, in which, in evoking the nightmare of Vietnam, Saviano yearns for the normality of being a war correspondent, the most hazardous of journalistic assignments. Dispatches, he says, has accompanied him "like an obsession. It is writing that sees and feels everything ..."See the full content of this document
Extract
Italy's Most Wanted
Saviano, however, chose not report on a distant war but one on his doorstep. Born in Naples in 1979, he grew up knowing only too well the vindictive and merciless criminality of the Camorra. He knew too that by writing ...
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