Saviano and his translator, Antony Shugaar, use the nuances of language to reflect on the culture that produces gangs of violent young boys ... The Piranhas contains scenes of violence that are shocking not just in their ferocity but for the youth and immaturity of the perpetrators. The gangsters of this novel are children who carry out crimes in between rounds of PlayStation ... Saviano paints a portrait of youthful disaffection and misguided priorities, ending in tragedy as daisy chains of violent acts reach their inevitable conclusions.
The Piranhas is a readable jumble of 'j’accuse' and academia, of highfalutin phrase-making and mean-streets action ... There are guns and girls (there’s a bit of a love story with Letizia). It all sounds authentic, but the pace is pretty idling—there are paragraphs that continue over two pages. Some of the sentences wouldn’t get past the first day of a creative writing course ... The plot isn’t bad. Things happen, even if the smooth ascent of our anti-hero is a bit James Bond at times ... The reason it annoys the reader is that occasionally you get hints of decent writing. You sense, for a page or two, that it’s going to get all Elmore Leonard—fast, precise and funny—but then it suddenly goes saggy again, and you wonder if Saviano has become such an iconic writer that no one dares to edit him any more.
Nothing is allowed to unfold without Saviano’s weighty comment ... One soon gives up trying to remember who is who. Nor does the translation help. Antony Shugaar has done sterling work in the past, but he never finds a credible register for Saviano’s overheated prose, let alone dialogues in Neapolitan dialect ... Perhaps Saviano’s clunky imagery is contagious. In Shugaar’s defence one can only say that almost any translation would have pointed up the uneasily inauthentic voice of this disappointing book.
It is raw and shocking, revelatory stuff. And the author knows how to keep his narrative hurtling forward like the scooters his young hoodlums ride at life-endangering speeds through the back streets of Naples ... But what is lacking in Saviano’s otherwise dexterous work is motivation — a surprising omission for a writer who has become a hero of the left ... Frustratingly absent is any hint of what turned Saviano’s antihero, the gang leader Nicolas Fiorillo, into an amoral killer.
Throughout, Saviano displays a profound knowledge of organised crime in Naples today ... At one point [Saviano] alludes to the Neapolitan director Francesco Rosi’s 1963 film Hands over the City, which chronicles the rise of the Camorra from loan-sharking to the construction business, and eventually to involvement in drugs. The film radiates a dark, gritty beauty that is absent from The Piranhas.
Although absorbing at times, the novel lacks convincing characterisation and, it must be said, lends itself poorly to translation.
The Piranhas will sit on different shelf in libraries and bookstores than his previous work, but it shares this essential uncertainty: What is true? What isn’t? ... Saviano gestures towards the teenager’s pain but never makes us feel it. Readers are as isolated from normal human experience as a sociopath might be, and, perhaps, as Nicolas is.
One of the most striking elements of the story is the indifference the majority of the gang exhibits as they plunge deeper into dangerous situations. They may be youthful, nervous, and inexperienced, but these teens’s perseverance (and motivation) prevails over all else ... The implementation of the original Italian, especially in the scenes of violence, serves the story’s atmosphere, preserving as it does the Neapolitan culture in which the novel is set. (At times, though, the lines can read stilted.) The Piranhas makes a vivid impression. Saviano creates a clear picture of children being led into the hands of violence and terror, leaving us with dread for the youth of Naples who can’t resist the temptations offered by organized crime.
Saviano, well-established as a crime journalist, delivers an effective yarn without much of a moral: Bad kids will rise to their own level, and, if given half a chance, the best of them will become even worse than their best teachers. There are a lot of Neapolitan cultural details, perhaps a touch too much for the casual reader, and a few walk-on characters too many, but Saviano’s story careens to a satisfying if sanguinary conclusion. A well-wrought crime story that could as easily have been a documentary: truthful and sobering.
Nicolas is willing to sacrifice people for power, and the denouement of the story is gut-wrenching proof that, for him, the end justifies the means. But the story suffers from too many unrealized characters, as well as the frustrating inclusion of both Italian and English dialogue next to one another in the text. This valiant novelization of an inhumane world is overcrowded and overlong.
