Catania is looking for its hero: like Gotham

06 May 2024, 12:31

2 min read

Evidently, the author had the need to deal with Catania. Once again. With its dark plots and its karst plots that tie together crime, bad politics and everything else.

Bourbon in a round of blues

A violent city, intrinsically projected towards muscular exaggeration and a nostalgic return to the years of mafia rule. Sick. Besieged by entire fleets of tattooed and bearded young men who yearn for that suffocating season, deluding themselves into dominating others and themselves by holding a weapon. Catania is looking for its hero, like Gotham. Giovanni Coppola he knows it perfectly and in fact demands another ending. With “Bourbon in a round of blues” (Algra), a novel that comes a short distance from the equally effective “A common wrong story”, wants a showdown.

Coppola would like to disinfect Catania: he really believes it. But the tongue beats where the tooth hurts. The pages flow quickly: thanks also to a powerful and at the same time smooth writing. After all, you cannot describe certain nuances of humanity if you are not skilled with the pen, like that surgeon who, by cutting the flesh, wants to discover where the soul lives.

Bourbon in a round of blues: why

A pub – the Charlie Brown – as a microcosm and a handful of friends called to represent a portion of twilight brotherhood. Every plot starts from there and is resolved there. Sex, love, alcohol, drugs, journalism weakened according to the dictates of the quiet life, immigration in light and dark, politics and politically correct to be unmasked.

There is everything and perhaps even more between the lines and the dynamics of a novel that owes so much to Emmanuel Carrère it’s at John Fante, not surprisingly the subject of a dutiful cameo. Because the classics must be read and honoured, like an ascetic exercise. The meaning of this is explained by the Professor, the character who gives the existential direction to the novel: «Me? I will continue to buy books and read them all, and when death comes to visit me, I will tell it the stories I have read, so we won’t be bored.” Happy reading and happy life.

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