The 3 best books by Fernando Benzo

On many occasions the writer's vocation ends up succumbing to other types of contingencies. Abandonment, or at least withdrawal from writing, is very common among many writers who at any time could have reached that level of repercussion for one of their works that could keep them in the profession.

Patience, confidence, tenacity or knowing how to find the moment. The point is that the budding writer, or at least in the haven of intimacy, can always find a good time to start resizing the scope of his work.

An interesting and paradigmatic case is that of Fernando Benzo, writer since his twenties and recognized author since in 2019 he hit the right key with «The Ashes of Innocence».

The good thing about already having a previous journey is that the spark of success can give new opportunities to previous works that even extend this author's bibliography into self-publishing with an interesting science fiction novel called «The castaways of the Plaza Mayor«.

With his taste for a black genre that takes us into organized crime, from the mafia to terrorism, Fernando Benzo manages to magnetize readers with that tension typical of the genre and the consistency of action-packed plots between the underworlds and offset by reflection on those characters and the souls that inhabit them.

Top 3 recommended novels by Fernando Benzo

We were never heroes

There is something tremendously human manifest in the title of this novel, of revelation to the open grave, of testimony or of expiation. Something like that Sean Penn and Robert de Niro movie, "We were never angels." And it is that we never were ... it has a lot to contravene the kind ideas formed about someone.

Neither Gabo, the ex-commissioner of the plot, managed to stop that evil against which a cop conspires when he first takes his pistol, nor Harri, the terrorist escaped to Colombia, is already able to glimpse how heroic there is in his homicidal acts, despite to be willing to keep killing. A parallel dilemma of the path that both arrive from very different routes. Only Harri has not retired from the sinister dedication of killing. When Harri returns to Spain, Gabo assumes with the intensity of someone who no longer has another official mission that Harri is his final nemesis.

At his side will be Estela, a young policewoman who counteracts the unbearable tension of Gabo who expects revenge, perhaps far beyond what it is up to Harri to assume. At times Gabo and Estela become generational representatives faced with mirrors that misplace them, that position them halfway between past and present, where only fears and dark spaces of all the time that have expired since Gabo began to be a police officer until the days of the new police represented in Estela.

We were never heroes

The ashes of innocence

At first, the translation of gangster literature to anywhere other than Chicago or New York sounds pretentious. But in the end I always tend to pay attention to the daring, to that creative insolence that in this case leads us to import a distinctly American imaginary to adapt it to Spanish circumstances, with the post-war black market as a comparison with prohibition.

In fact, in Spain there were many criminal organizations of all kinds, perhaps not with the level of sophistication of the Italian emigrants who reached the other side of the ocean, but with the same crudeness, when appropriate.

If not, we can consult the same Perez Reverte who not so long ago gave birth to a famous Falcó contemporary of the characters in this plot. And this is how we can finally enjoy this novel by Fernando Benzo, well constructed on the other hand and with high doses of this dark tension that every visit to the underworld awakens.

In every underworld, at any time, children who are beginning to grow out of it find their easiest way out in crime. Clean records to stain and energy to burn in gunpowder smoke. With easy money as the foundation of everything, yes.

The protagonist of the plot is a guy who launches us on the adventure of his life since he was an underage boy already marked by the blood of his first victim. Only the voices of his conscience prevented him from immersing himself in that Billy the Kid complex that seems to free the lesser criminals. But it was about surviving ...

It all started in the Dixie, a place that emerged from the ashes of Madrid that has already expired where criminals divide the business under the law of the fittest and the guidelines of the corruption of power where characters who also thrived with black businesses settled.

That's where little Emilio met Nico, a relationship that at times appears like a candid childhood friendship only overshadowed by circumstances. 

Both had a lot to learn ahead of them about the murky business of post-war misery, until the critical moment in which luck stopped smiling on them and their innocence ended, as the novel points out, by throwing ashes on the bonfire of the underworld...

The ashes of innocence

After the rain

The stigma of losers has a lot to do with self-punishment. The question is the prism with which things are observed. In this plot we meet the Canales brothers. One goes one way and the other is back (the thing goes beyond the metaphorical sense since Paco, the oldest, returns home after years of political-military resistance and jail).

The opportunities for reconciliation, whether between lovers or for brothers, are more the sum of wills than expected circumstances such as the alignment of planets or the deciphering of messages that never arrive.

Of course, the death of a parent is never the best time to approach a hug between siblings with new nascent happiness, but the issue is more about that assumed fatality of what cannot be and is also impossible.

But the most curious thing about this story is how in the sublimation of the fatal, with the addition of new events that could lead to the worst, it awakens that outbreak of humanity that resists only when it is about to be crushed.

The feeling of brotherhood despite everything blooms again to move us from that sad impression that on many occasions, unfortunately, only when something is about to be lost forever, we discover that it was the only thing necessary to find some happiness along the way. .

After the rain
5/5 - (13 votes)

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