Newsgroup: it.discussioni.giallo
Titolo: Pelecanos - Il Giardiniere Notturno

Da domani in libreria "Il giardiniere notturno" di George Pelecanos (ed. or.
2006) uno dei suoi romanzi più apprezzati dalla critica (o forse proprio il
più apprezzato).
Al solito Piemme pubblica i libri di Pelecanos come capita o magari sono io
che mi sono perso l'uscita di Drama City... che era del 2005.
Qui sotto l'articolo del NY Times.
Ciao,
Enzo
------------------------------------------------------------
While Lives Are Lost, Another Is Redeemed
By JANET MASLIN
Published: July 24, 2006
The prologue to George Pelecanos’s new book, “The Night Gardener,” is set in
1985. It describes a crime scene in Washington. The victim is a 14-year-old
girl, and the police are all over this case, at least temporarily. There is
every reason to expect Mr. Pelecanos to do the expected: lead the reader
through a tricky, serpentine investigation until the killer is found.
 
But Mr. Pelecanos is not the usual crime writer. He does not ask questions
in the usual way. Instead of concentrating on how and why this girl died, he
wonders where 20 years will take the police officers glimpsed in this
opening chapter. (Most of the story takes place in 2005.) He wonders how
Washington’s urban landscape will change. He wonders how the world society
will shift when family ties loosen and popular culture gets uglier. He
wonders what it means to solve a murder case, if it means anything at all.
He wonders how the past germinates into the future.
As part of the ace crime writers team (along with Richard Price and Dennis
Lehane) that has worked on the HBO series “The Wire,” Mr. Pelecanos has had
experience with stories that involve large numbers of characters and
panoramic urban sociology. He also takes the larger cause-and-effect view of
factors that contribute to criminal motivation. So nothing that happens in
“The Night Gardener” is without context, or without consequences. Like his
most recent book, “Drama City,” this novel weaves dozens of small stories
into one big, overarching one. And like “Drama City” it is
heart-in-your-throat gripping from beginning to end.
“The Night Gardener” is another of Mr. Pelecanos’s beautifully delineated
moral tales, filled with gut-wrenching turns of fate and razor-sharp,
boisterously vivid characters. Among all the details of its intricately
woven story, one item leaps out: a hat. It belongs to Dan Holiday, who was a
swaggering young cop in 1985 but has since descended into alcoholism and
denial.
Holiday makes regular visits to bars in the daytime but never admits to
being drunk. The way he sees it, he’s just tired.
Holiday is still a man in uniform: a dark suit and a white shirt. He could
be dressed for any number of professions if the hat in his car were not a
dead giveaway. It is a chauffeur’s hat; Holiday drives visiting big shots
around Washington. (Mr. Pelecanos has some fun at the expense of an author
on book tour.) Translation: There is no particular reason for Holiday to get
up in the morning. His ambition died when his police career ended in
disgrace.
The internal affairs investigation that brought down Holiday was led by Gus
Ramone, Holiday’s straight-arrow partner. Ramone is a family man facing many
of the problems Mr. Pelecanos chronically dramatizes. He worries about how
to keep his kids out of trouble. He is white and his wife is black, so the
whole family knows its way around racism and hypocrisy. The Ramones send
their son, Diego, to a mostly white Maryland school in a neighborhood where
“Celebrate Diversity” is a phrase seen on bumper stickers. “Unless diversity
is walking down your street on a Saturday night,” Gus remarks.
The death of one of Diego’s friends sets the book’s present-day plot in
motion. The Night Gardener of the title leaves his victims in community
vegetable gardens, and the new killing is linked to the one in the prologue
that way. At the end of the book Mr. Pelecanos lists young victims of
Washington’s Freeway Phantom, who killed them in the early 1970’s. His story
celebrates the kind of dedication that would keep a detective on a case that
cold.
“The Night Gardener” has its own rogues’ gallery. Mr. Pelecanos has a fine
way with a felon, and he chillingly captures the blowhard mentality of the
would-be criminal. This book’s resident troublemaker is Romeo Brock, whose
Vandyke beard and pointy ears give him a devilish appearance that he
cultivates further by wearing red. “Brock called himself Jamaican but had
never set foot on the island,” Mr. Pelecanos writes. “He was as American as
folding money and war.”
Mr. Pelecanos keeps the reader rapt for nearly 100 pages as he puts all the
pieces of this puzzle in place. Finally it becomes clear how the novel will
coalesce. Holiday will find the body in the garden and make a 911 call to
the police. Ramone will know who is calling. In an elegantly succinct
gesture, Holiday will take off that chauffeur’s hat and get back onto the
Night Gardener’s trail.
The truth about what happened ultimately defies some of the characters’ most
basic assumptions. And it gives Mr. Pelecanos yet another kind of tragedy to
explore.
If the least convincing aspect of “The Night Gardener” involves the victims’
names, which are all palindromes (Eve, Otto, Ava, Asa), the most authentic
touches are small ones. Mr. Pelecanos knows exactly what Diego’s room would
look like; exactly how a team of investigators would use Mountain Dew as
part of the interrogation process; exactly how an officious new assistant
district attorney would miss the point of what those investigators do.
He knows how the gentrification of Northeast Washington would create a
no-man’s-land just outside it. And he knows the sights and sounds of a
neighborhood in transition. “Roofers hauled shingles and tar buckets up
ladders, and real estate agents stood on the sidewalks, nervously aware of
their surroundings as they talked on their cells,” he writes.
In “The Night Gardener” Mr. Pelecanos reiterates what he has long believed:
that we are what we eat, drink, suffer, love, hear and see. Alcohol and junk
food are virtual characters in this book. Cruelty leaves a lasting
impression. So do strong family ties and a work ethic. Yet in the midst of
these kinds of certitudes the police must do their work in a moral limbo.
It’s tough for them to eke out small victories. It’s even tougher to let the
larger ones go.
--------------------------------
Inviato via 
http://arianna.libero.it/usenet/

piů apprezzato).
 Confermo. Pelecanos č un grande scrittore, e The Night Gardener il
suo romanzo piů bello. Romanzo eccezionale.
lc


:-)))))))))))))))
Grazie dell'informazione!!!!!
Nicola

 Nicola
-- 
questo articolo e` stato inviato via web dal servizio gratuito 
http://www.newsland.it/news
 segnala gli abusi ad 
ab...@newsland.it