Peter Benchley
Lo Squalo

THE REVIEW

How many times have I read this book?? Maybe five or six times... And usually, I rarely reread books I've already read. You know, when a book particularly moves me, I tend to recommend it to all my friends, acquaintances, and family. In the case of "Jaws" by Peter Benchley, you can easily imagine that those who are a bit sensitive, as soon as they hear the word "shark," start picturing blood, torn limbs, blood, and screams...

Definitely.

A shark is not a vegetarian, and if a human comes in its path instead of a seal... well, it'll eat them.

But that's not all. Peter Benchley's book is much more. And I would often say to people, "but read it, it's a wonderful book, it's not scary" and so on...

Maybe I'm not good at expressing myself...

The fact is that the 291 pages of this book are indescribable. It's not horror, it's not a thriller, it's everything, it's... anything! It's the story of Amity, a community torn apart by ONE shark. And mind you, one... because there are others in the waters of Amity, but it's one that causes all this havoc! It's a Great White Shark that, as if by some divine curse, inexplicably wreaks havoc on a town that relies solely on tourism. It's meaner than the others, it preys on humans. Why? For Amity's ruin, the shark is THE cataclysm. A small internal catastrophe is the story of the existential torment of a charming woman approaching middle age, Ellen Brody, who no longer knows what the purpose of her life is after dedicating herself to raising her children. Ellen goes through a crisis she believes she can solve with a man who isn't her husband, the young New Yorker Matt Hooper, a "shark expert" sent to Amity to understand this animal. The goodness of people against greed and dirty interests is represented by Harry Meadows, a journalist "allied" with commissioner Brody, who between one feast and another (the descriptions of which are very amusing) is the only one trying to tell the truth to the people, to say: there's a shark and it eats people.

But "Jaws" is above all the story of commissioner Martin Brody, who between the lines sometimes seems to almost curse his fear of water. Martin is an honest, charismatic person, who seems to have no interest beyond that of his community, of which he is the law representative. He doesn't suffer like the greedy and corrupt mayor for money and the terrible summer season, but for the people dying, for a death toll that seems to start with the shark then continues and leads to the consequent poverty and ruin of Amity. Who can Brody take it out on? God? The mayor? No one but the shark, and when a person is good inside, he does things that even he doesn't understand the reason for, and there he goes with the fisherman Quint and the "enemy" Hooper towards the ocean, in HIS territory. The natural man-eating cataclysm.

Men on the boat, shark in the water. The animal seems to play with them, bored, seems to defy the normal laws of nature, seems really to be something more than an animal. It kills Hooper, who had dived into the cage to admire it, kills Quint when all the unleashed power had destroyed their boat, and comes to brush against Martin Brody, then mysteriously expires, dragged away by the barrels.....

This isn't a story of an animal, it's a tale of lives, stories, emotions. It's one of the books that really left something with me.

A masterpiece, to read and own.