Almost exactly two years ago I published a post titled “The other books: The problem of non-fiction”. I started by worrying about whether it is really true that as readers age the novel loses its charm and the other prose books gain ground in our preferences as readers. As I approach my 48th birthday I can very well say that this is the case, although novels still play in my reading habit a role that no other prose book can fulfil. Having said that, I know already, and it is only May, that I won’t read this year a better book than Roberto Saviano’s ZeroZeroZero, which begs many questions about what the best books are today (and what we mean by that).
To begin with, it’s hard to say to which genre ZeroZeroZero belongs. Saviano is a journalist and what he offers here is a report based on his (life-threatening) research. Yet, the chapter organization, the personal considerations and the often literary prose suggest that the aim is not just transmitting a certain type of information and a thesis (that cocaine plays a much bigger role in the world’s economy than we suspect). The aim is demonstrating that thesis, of course, but Saviano chose to do so in a way that also tickles the reading centres of our brain.
As I read I was, however, a bit confused about what I was supposed to feel, for my reactions veered from total horror at the violence Saviano narrates to admiration at the intelligent way he handles the telling of the tale. His previous book, Gomorra (2006), which I also admired very much, produces a similar effect: as a reader I don’t know what is the main key to the text –what it tells, how the author tells it or that Saviano has risked his life and lives under escort since then for his readers. I was going to claim that I ‘enjoyed’ Gomorra, but perhaps this is the key to my problem: it seems quite callous to enjoy Saviano’s books and perhaps I should stay with ‘admire’ as the most fitting verb.
Saviano answers towards the end of his book the question every reader is asking him mentally: why risk your life, and enrage the gangsters that run the world? He explains that his aim is telling the truth and that he will have been successful in his task if, after reading his book the reader feels that the world is a different place from what it was before opening the book covers. I do feel that and I thank Saviano for opining my eyes but, and this is a problem shared by Julian Assange and Edward Snowden, I wonder whether these heroes really get their admirers to go beyond that admiration. Here I am saying that ZeroZeroZero is a great book, which is as absurd as praising Wikileaks for the quality of the prose in their communications. Perhaps, I am just wondering, this is Saviano’s fault for choosing to write a beautifully written volume instead of a dry report (I did miss, if you ask me a dramatis personae list as I couldn’t retain the many gangsters’ names he mentions, and I would have been grateful for an appendix with a map of the main cocaine transport lines).
Also in the last chapters Saviano considers for a moment whether he would have saved himself much trouble by writing ZeroZeroZero as a novel. In his way, he could have used false names for the gangsters and protect himself from their wrath. Actually non-fiction very often uses a hybrid form that he could have used, with frequent dramatisation of key scenes in the style of novels including dialogue that may or not have happened as it reproduced. Saviano’s book is full of memorable, terrifying scenes and it’s easy to imagine a soon-to-come film version based on them, as happened with Gomorra (made into a film in 2008). Yet, he uses mainly reporting prose to tell these stories, making it clear that his territory is not that of the novel, not even of the novelised non-fiction book in the style of Capote’s pioneering In Cold Blood.
I don’t take cocaine and never have, which is why in a way I can easily disconnect from Saviano’s whistle blowing –I find people who choose to destroy their precious neurons as deserving of their sad fate as people who choose to drink or smoke themselves to death. I know I sound smug but all addictions are initially a matter of choice. What I really appreciate in Saviano’s books (and I know that here I’m writing like a bad student, introducing new ideas in what should be my conclusion) is his relentless portrayal of patriarchal masculinity.
Reading about the lives of gangsters in Gomorra and of the cocaine lords in ZeroZeroZero, men always destined to be eliminated by their competitors often in very cruel ways or to serve long jail sentences, one wonders what the attraction can be. Unlike the public gangsters we all have in mind, I mean the corrupt politicians who live la vida loca without hiding at all, Saviano’s villains get, as the proverb about he wicked goes, no rest. He does explain in both books the simple truth: any disempowered man (and a tiny handful of women) given the chance to enjoy absolute power in his circle even at the risk of losing it all quickly will go for that, take his chance and hope it lasts.
Every time you snort white powder up your nose think of how you’re upholding the most sinister version of patriarchy. I’m sure few think of that…
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