In the great batch of American writers of the generation of 30, Tom wolfe y Gay talese They came to our days with that elegant and neat image, with a very different literature but a role as high-class writers, as in the past it was assumed that a writer should be.
Then as I say there is what each one wrote and there the plot distance is abysmal because Wolfe is the author of some of the greatest fictions of purely American imaginary of the XNUMXth century and Talese is that necessary chronicler with his New York as the center on which almost all his literature orbits.
A literature that for Talese was an appendix of the journalistic chronicles of his time, when journalism had the arduous task of distributing the most uncomfortable truths for the common of mortals for the sake of truth and knowledge.
Without being able to qualify him as a narrator of fictions, the Talese label delved into its books in the chronicle made a long article, in the recreation of the most angular realities with that interest and that will (not without pride) to offer the most prism complete with everything that was cooked around him.
Top 3 Recommended Gay Talese Books
You will honor your father
In '71, Talese dared to write about the mafia for the first time (beyond the fictions of Mario Puzo) and survived the miraculous challenge. For posterity there remains this book that clearly explained what everything about the mafia was like without artifice or narrative lyricism.
To document himself he saw no better way than to go to the origin of everything, to that Sicily where all the family codes were born, respect, honesty understood in his own way, the defense of the familiar ... And boy did he know closely how everything worked ...
One rainy night in October 1964, two gangsters kidnapped notorious mob boss Joseph Bonanno. The following morning the New York police reported his death. A year later, Bonanno mysteriously reappeared, and his return sparked a bloody feud between mob families.
This monumental work, which reads like a fast-paced novel "full of intimate details and the fruit of brilliant journalistic work," became a bestseller since its publication, it was brought to the television screen in CBS miniseries and would even serve as inspiration to create The Sopranos. No other book has done so much to unravel the secrets, structure, wars, power struggles, family lives, and fascinating and terrifying personalities of the mob.
the bridge
I recently took care of the book The cathedrals of heaven, by Michel Moutot, a story about intrastories, those of the lives of those in charge of turning New York into the first great city of skyscrapers. Straddling reality and a certain point of mythology, the book teaches us how the Big Apple has become the symbol it is.
Now we have to address the history of the Verrazano-Narrowks Bridge, which is the same, the famous link between Brookyl and Staten Island. It may not be as famous as the Brooklyn Bridge with Manhattan itself, but its project, development, completion and the passage of time and lives around it, well deserved this story halfway between the story and the reality of its materialization.
If even today, with its more than 4.000 meters of suspension, in constant defiance of gravity, it continues to maintain its architectural value as one of the longest of all the suspensions in the world, we can imagine what it meant back in 1964, when it was founded. concluded.
Gay Talese exerts in this book as a chronicler, with a mythological touch, with almost legendary contributions from various testimonies. The little things and the big problems that arose during the realization of this bridge now surface with that aftertaste of the closest, almost tangible history, that of the men and women who participated in that ancestral idea that is to unite two slopes to unify continents, countries. , cities, neighborhoods and people ...
El Verrazano-Narrowks bridge It now stands out as a great work of engineering, but since its planning it encountered a thousand and one adversities, from what it involved in the mobilization of people who occupied the areas where it needed to be implemented, to the mishaps, the tasks carried out in the past by risky men where Now everything is mechanized.
Without a doubt, it was worth telling without leaving anything behind, with that brightness of the memories that glorify, between melancholy and satisfaction, everything that the human being is capable of carrying out ...
The voyeur's motel
The world is full of Norman Bates (the one from Psycho), or James Stewart in the rear window. And is that Alfred Hitchcock he knew what was about when he projected the worst terrors into that human mania of observing the lives of others with ominous pleasure ...
Gay Talese received a letter from a mysterious man in Colorado telling him a surprising secret: he had bought a motel to give free rein to his voyeuristic desires. In the ventilation ducts he had installed an "observation platform" through which he spied on his clients.
Talese then traveled to Colorado, where he met Gerald Foos and was able to see with his own eyes the veracity of the story. In addition, he had access to some of his many diaries: a secret record on the change in social and sexual customs in his country. But Foos had also witnessed a murder, and he hadn't given it away. So he had every reason to remain anonymous, and Talese thought that this story would never see the light of day.
Today, thirty-six years later, Foos is ready to go public and Talese can make it known. The voyeur's motel is an extraordinary work of narrative journalism that opens an intense ethical debate, and one of the most talked about books in recent years.
