Why a Booktrail?
2000s: Memories of a man who has worked in the Carabinieri for many years but who is now suffering a breakdown as he looks back on his past.
The Silence of the Wave
What you need to know before your trail
Every Monday and Thursday, Roberto Marías walks across Rome to see his psychiatrist. This is a tough appointment for him as it brings back so many memories that he has tried to keep buried but which he knows have lead him to having a breakdown now.
He takes each memory as it comes up to the surface of the flood in his brain. His years spent working as an undercover agent for the national military police (the Carabinieri) in Italy haunt him still and his only colleagues from that time who still pay him regular visits are cynicism and corruption. His visits here, his stroll across Rome and his chance meeting with Emma – another client receiving treatment may just be the light at the end of the tunnel he is waiting for. When Giacomo, Emma’s eleven year old son asks Roberto to help him conquer his nightmares, Roberto must once again face his own.
Travel Guide
The journey here is one through the foggy and claustrophobic mind of Roberto. As he strolls across the city of Rome, then so the reader is taken on a journey of the city and Italian society as much as Roberto’s mind and past guilt.
Roberto has fallen down a deep crevice in his life – having had a breakdown and now living avery different life to that he had when working for the military police, he is now an outsider looking in and back on his own life.
On doctor’s orders he wanders across Rome and thinks about who he is and what he was – both on a private and professional level. Working undercover amongst drug cartels and the kind of people who live in them, has left him with a troubled mind and a guilt which has followed him around ever since. His Rome is a maze of confusion and regret, of feeling lost, abandoned, claustrophobic and trapped.
This is also Giacomo’s world – the nightmares which frighten him, his difficulty at school and his dreams which take him to a park utopia in the company of a talking dog. Confusion and nearing adolescence are his world and when his path crosses with that of Roberto, they forge a new one together.
Rome out of all this, is a city of contrasts. Drug cartels and seedy underbelly of a tourist city – where the film Roman Holiday and Audrey Hepburn shine as a homage to the city on one hand – and where the dark shady alleyways hide a deeper and less palatable setting.
And all throughout, Roberto delves into the workings of the Italian police force and the world of good communities being infiltrated by bad. And the world that results.
Where Next?
