Sandokan
Nanni Balestrini
Translated by Antony Shugaar
A major Italian author’s tale of growing up with Italy’s most brutal criminal enterprise, the Camorra
This striking novella is based on first-hand research of the Camorra, an Italian organized crime network more powerful and violent than the Mafia. It’s the brutal organization that was recently exposed by Roberto Saviano, both in his brilliant non-fiction account and the film adaptation. Saviano, as it turns out, first interviewed Camorra members while working as a research assistant to Nanni Balestrini, collecting the stories that would become Sandokan.
Though fiction, Sandokan is horribly, devastatingly real. The narrator is a resigned victim of the Camorra. The Camorra members are his neighbors, and he presents an uncompromising description of a world under savage occupation, the true combination of backwardness, violence, and ambition that locks small-town southern Italy under the control of organized crime. It is one of the most meaningful and riveting books to have been produced by Italian literature of recent years, by one of Italy’s most significant authors.
PRESS AND REVIEWS
"Sandokan is literature, capable of prying open, like a powerful crowbar, the grates of history in our part of Italy.... a work of literature with enormous power of moral and civic denunciation.”
—Roberto Saviano, author of Gomorrah: A Personal Journey into the Violent International Empire of Naples’ Organized Crime System
"Dark and unforgiving... Sandokan is a masterful Italian tragedy, blunt and never romantic."
—Bookslut
SEE ALSO
;)
Sandokan
Nanni Balestrini
Translated by Antony Shugaar
Fiction/ Novella
128 pages/ Paperback
$13.00/ $16.00 CAN
ISBN: 978-1-933633-80-0
Published: November 2009
