The “Bastardi di Pizzofalcone” give in to introspection and feeling, characters brought to life by the writer Maurizio de Giovanni, also famous thanks to a very successful television series, and who now return for the thirteenth time in “Sons” (Einaudi).
And here they are the “Bastardi” «in that stratified place, which is Pizzofalcone», towards which each of them has developed a sense of belonging, finding in that historic neighborhood redemption from a past marked by difficult days. Yet right there, that police station that the deputy commissioner Luigi Palma should have accompanied to its closure found a new vitality and those “outcasts rejected by the community” became a team linked by strong motivations for a complicated but exhilarating job.
It is three o’clock one night in July when in Via Egiziaca in Pizzofalcone, far from his home, Francesco Cascetta, a well-known pathologist, is hit by a pirate car. It soon becomes clear that it is a murder, perhaps out of revenge. That once ramshackle and now so efficient team is set in motion: deputy commissioner Luigi Palma, Giorgio Pisanelli, retired deputy commissioner, deputy commissioner Elsa Martini, Giuseppe Lojacono, inspector (historical character with whom the Bastards series began), Francesco Romano, chief assistant, Ottavia Calabrese, deputy superintendent, Alessandra “Alex” Di Nardo, assistant agent, Marco Aragona, chosen agent.
But this, like other books by de Giovanni, is much more than a mystery, with its character, always profound, which enters into the jumble of the human heart, into lives and relationships, into the tears and seams of that plot which is life itself. And here it is the children who give the texture of the novel a grain that is transversal to the story but fundamental. The “bastards” are grappling with the weight of their children and everyday life, a “burden” that they face with the roughness, simplicity, anxiety or complexity of each person’s character: parents to whom their children dictate their daily lives with the tiring, everyday language, and “restless, or demanding, or sudden, or hypothetical, or abusive, or degenerate, or other people’s children”. «The children. Maybe when you don’t have them you don’t miss them, and when you have them you wonder how you lived before having them. Perhaps”.