The Crossroads

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'The Crossroads'
by Niccolo Ammaniti
(Canongate)

The grim tale of a boy cursed by circumstance, 'The Crossroads' by Niccolo Ammaniti is a gripping read with a tangible sense of urgency.

Cristiano is 13 and trapped in a dismal if devoted relationship with his father, Rino Zena, a tattooed, Nazi-supporting, skinhead and brute of a man. They live in a desolate industrial suburb of northern Italy, their ramshackle home significant of their bleak prospects. Abandoned by his mother, unpopular and failing at school, Christiano has little to hang onto but dad and his two cronies.

Quattro Formaggi, nicknamed for his favourite pizza, and Rino have been friends since their upbringing in a children’s home. Quattro Formaggi is the local village idiot and Rino his protector; a role that grants the psychopathic Rino some semblance of humanity.

Making up the doomed quartet is Danilo Aprea, a wreck of a man since the tragic day five years earlier when his three year old daughter choked to death. Seeking solace at the bottom of a bottle, Danilo has yet to come up for air. He has now lost his wife to drink, but remains convinced he can win her back if only he can finance her dream to own a shop. It is for this that Danilo hatches a plan to ramraid the ATM at the local bank.

Ammaniti divides the story into three sections: BEFORE (Friday, Saturday, Sunday), THE NIGHT, and AFTER (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday). When Danilo first moots the plan on Friday, Rino is less than convinced. By Sunday, however, he’s lost his job and the leader of the pack, decides the raid is on.

NIGHT unfolds with consequences as devastating as they are dramatic. One of the four commits a ghastly crime that delivers a shocking and wholly unexpected plot twist. A sinister betrayal then leaves the reader, against all odds, rooting for the crazed Rino Zena.

And Cristiano? He’s left to pick up the pieces, but his innocence is gone. It is a brutal rite of passage for a boy whose only real flaw is to be a product of his environment.

'The Crossroads' is an amazing piece of writing. Despite the unremittingly bleak subject matter and sense of disintegration, Ammaniti writes evocatively and with occasional flashes of humour. The individual narratives weave and knot until every character is brought to a crossroads of some sort. But it is inevitably Cristiano’s story that is the most poignant – the boy who is cast into life’s darkest corner, but must somehow deal with the horror to find his way out.

- Yinka Akindele