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Rating: Truth and fiction, Dakar has been this from the very beginning. An experience suspended between chronicles and legends. A real place and a place of the soul, a bivouac of stories, incredible tales, stuff straight out of Ernest Hemingway.
Dakar racers and writers have always needed each other. The bikers have crossed deserts facing dangers, the night, and ghosts. Journalists and novelists have transcribed their destinies, have told them to the whole world. Yesterday through cameras, today through smartphones, no tool will ever exhaust the meaning and narrative of a challenge that puts flesh, bones, and life itself at stake. For the most intimate secrets and fears, and the truest euphoria and despair, spotlights are unnecessary; instead, one needs fires lit on cold nights, trust in others, a special chemistry among special men; someone to break the silence, another to listen with all the attention they can muster. In “80 chilometri a Dakar” magic happens; an understanding: Franco De Paoli recounts, evokes his extraordinary past driving a Rover, an almost won Pharaohs Rally, the dust of twenty-four Paris-Dakars in his lungs, the fateful encounter with Thierry Sabine when everything was still just a dream, a wild idea sketched on a map. Cristina Cardone takes this as a pretext to bring imaginary characters to life, she moves them in places which captivate, she creates narrative. A novel suitable for living rooms as much as for hands dirty with oil; sophisticated suggestions that illuminate engineering details, workshop anecdotes, spells, and tricks and subterfuges to face the desert, cross Africa and survive it.
Brief side note. We hope the next edition of the text will improve in editing, its only flaw; the content deserves it, it is sand between the fingers, pure Dakar.
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