Don Winslow
Città in fiamme

Don Winslow: City on Fire

Dry, intense, sharp. It’s the writing that hits you hard and makes Don Winslow one of the best American storytellers of today and beyond. He is often relegated to the noir genre, as if genres were second-rate literature, but to me, they are not at all.

His writing is without frills, always seeking synthesis, without rhetoric or digressions, often leaving the reader with nothing but raw reality, stunning and inflicting.

Certainly, he is not being discovered today with this latest work. He is a celebrated and acclaimed author and inexplicably absent from the Deb, so I believe it won't be a drama if I dare to talk about him.

His stories and plots are just a means to give a lucid and merciless look inside the American dream, the most lurid and unsettling one.

1950s, New England, Rhode Island, Providence. Seemingly a quiet town, a quiet region.

One of those regions among the first to be conquered and populated by many immigrants, and it's precisely the Irish first and the Italians later who take control and together, form a criminal empire. The former take the port dealings and the powerful unions, while the latter take the protection money and prostitution. Robberies to both, except in their respective areas. Drugs aren't mentioned and are not to be talked about. It's something for Blacks, but it won't last long. A lot of money is made there, which begins to entice some.

So far, nothing new. It might seem like the beginning of a Scorsese film.

But Fate is always lurking.

And Fate, as in the Iliad, introduces Helen. Another Helen, but equally decisive in the ensuing delirium. And so it was war.

Themes, now classic, such as honor, loyalty, betrayal follow, and a comparison with the Iliad might be valid, but who hasn't touched, in literature, these timeless fetishes?

I will certainly not reveal the vicissitudes of the protagonists nor the vortex of death and pain that proceeds slowly but inexorably, yet in this infernal comings and goings of epic and modern sentiments, a dynasty is being founded whose deeds will be seen in the coming years.

In fact, it seems that “City on Fire” is the first of a trilogy.

But it's the writing, as I said at the beginning, that remains impressed.

And it's the writing that will make some of you read other books of his.

And if you still don't know Don Winslow, this is a good book to start with.