Of course he is hungry, the swan. A black hunger. Cigno, or Domenico Cigno, Campania sports reporter, ex boxer, obese and tormented by a ferocious bulimia Almost as much as bullying (body shaming) of which it is the object. The protagonist of the brand new novel by Luca Mercadante “The hunger of the swan” (Sellerio) It would seem one of the many investigators of today’s literary scene, of those, in particular, marked by a physical or psychological stigma, or both, who all the more contrast with the acumen with which they clarify in the darkness of crime and the world .
But no. The Cigno narrative self – who had made his debut in the singular anthology “Animals in Yellow” of Sellerio released in November – denies expectationsdestroys (on shoulders, or perhaps in hooks) the clichés, starting from hunger. Which initially seems to dominate it, nailing it to massive carbohydrate doses with drug addiction mechanisms, but at some point it even becomes its opposite.
Because, since the name-antinomy, Everything, in this beautiful novel perfectly built and that define only “yellow” would be truly reductive, is played on dramatic contrasts. Starting from the place, on the coast of Campania, Castel Volturno area, a paradise converted into hell, where the dreams of development and well -being have changed in abandonment, between villas that have become ruins or ghettos and every meter of land, beach or channel subject to speculation , exploitation and occupation by mafias, camerings and consortiums.
The disappearance of a young influencer-journalist and the finding of the corpse of another young black woman They set in motion, in a context of profound degradation and social clash, a complicated and full of twists and turns, through which it passes – bringing with difficulty all its material and immaterial weights – the bulimic anti -hero, defeated by life and put to margins from the profession, with which, however, we empathize very soon.
It is a brutal world, that of the swan, and not only for prevailing criminals. The author does not discount even to journalism (old and new, between the paper that arrabits, with its hierarchies and jealousies, and social networks where all reporters are invented) and the institutions, crossed by connivances, mutual covers, hateful transversality. And the loneliness of the swan – whose fat is a condemnation and protection together, like his hunger – is actually densely populated.
The body of the swan is like the earth in which it lives badly: an infinitely looted body, filled and emptied of the wrong things – flooded and burned and built illegally and demolished and restored and invaded and plundered and attacked by everyone, friends and enemies – but always inhabited by a human pity that moves, in every semblance of cynicism. And then that body is that territory, where survival is a horrendous profit for someone, an affliction for many (“we live in houses that remember us continuously that we should not be here, that we would do well to escape elsewhere”).
But fortunately feelings always protect us, even when we are lost: The fatigue fathers and mothers (yes, also that of the swan, the dry swan-dry and granite swan at least how much the son is expanded and empathic) who also save the children, the enlarged and unlikely families, because the bonds make emotions, Not only the meat.
Last but not least The question of whites and blacksof the new poor and the poor of all time, whether they are cut by the Camorra or the Nigerian mafia, and what despair is more desperate, of which theft of the future is more atrocious, which scarring of places and men is scarier.
In this violent and painful world, up as at the bottom, It seems to have not been placed for sweetness, which also existsin hidden folds, in fleeting gestures, in some thoughts of the swan, which is in fact a particularly ugly duckling, but in our eyes, as we follow the tiring movements of his enormous body and the agile brilliance of his mind, and Even his dark tenderness covered with sarcasm becomes a real swan. Black, probably (like everything that spars and surprises).
It is a desperate and perverse world, his, where for the weakest there is no shelter, but where unpredictable chains of humanity can draw. One scene above all: the very strange Christmas table that brings together opposite worldsnot even peaceful. In the kitchen, to shoot the Afro-Italian ragù, there is a black woman who was called Europe because she was a hope, but for her it was a tragedy, and whose nickname is Mother, because being mothers, being a family is what of the soul and the intention, not only of the body.
In the end, beyond the (robust) yellow plot and the infinite, inner and external vicissitudes, of the protagonist Vibra, powerful, the ability of Mercadante – born in 1976, to its third book, special mention at the Calvino 2017 prize – to tell us, with the radiographic depth of the narrative, things, stories of today. Things we are. Then it doesn’t only matter to understand who killed those who, as in any self -respecting investigation, but who has saved who, and how much he can still do it.