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Rating: ......because in life size matters (especially when deciding whether or not to start a book). I'll give you some figures: 18 cm in height, 14 in width, 6 in depth, and 800, the number of pages. With this brick, you can build yourself a hyper-realistic imaginary world where you'll have the chance to live for at least a couple of weeks.
You'll enter the luxurious palaces overlooking Central Park, in the 1980s New York of Wall Street and Park Avenue (the one of the wealthy, to be clear), in the Bronx ghetto where African-Americans and Latinos dominate the scene that once belonged to the Irish and Italians. You can walk the streets, smelling the odors, feel immersed in the world of U.S. justice, in the convoluted mechanics of investigations, in the courtrooms. You'll find yourself amid a semi-revolt of the blacks controlled and directed by the false and opportunistic world of journalistic communication. You'll become engrossed in the affairs of Sherman McCoy, a thriving broker of a large financial firm who is swept into a dangerously vicious cycle of justice and mis-justice where everyone is guilty, and no one is spared. The cold electoral logics of Abe Weiss, head prosecutor of the Bronx district, will be revealed to you, along with the success-hungry journalist Peter Fallow, the media-judicial scandals so dear to our prosecutors, Sherman's extra-marital affair with the beguiling Maria Ruskin, the young wife of an old Jewish millionaire.
A thousand stories intertwined like in the best legal fiction Made in the USA. A thousand stories monstrously narrated by the perfect pen of Thomas Kennerly Wolfe Jr, among the fathers of the new journalism movement where the blend of literature and journalism reaches its peak precisely in "The Bonfire of the Vanities".
A fundamental book of the 20th century, fluid and sleek in its reading, suitable for those who love television and paper works with a judicial background, for those who love reportage, for those who don’t fall asleep when a writer takes thirty pages to describe a dinner scene of NY's rich. For those who love the psychological detail of the protagonists or the sociological critique of the U.S. world of the 80s, for those who would like to experience, at least in dreams, the sensations of the world of the ultra-rich or for those who feel sick just hearing the word "justice" (the ending is even nauseating). A perfect book that seems to describe one of the many Italian judicial events that leave a bitter taste or, more prosaically, those that infuriate like crazy. Eight hundred pages that capture the reader by always placing them inside the scene that the author describes meticulously both in terms of settings and dialogues, not leaving out the slightest detail. The greed for power and the ambitions for success (the polemical references to the Reagan era are clear) miserably backfire on the protagonists, each wearing the false mask imposed by the situation and society, the class struggle is exploited for sad political logics (does that remind you of anything???). A perfect book that encapsulates within it a thousand layers of action, a thousand layers of reading, a thousand perspectives. An absolute must-read.
But what can remain of a bonfire of vanities? Nothing but the intangible and inconsistent dust of narcissistic self-contentment that, at the first breath of wind, disperses forever. One word to close, masterpiece.
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