Maleantes collects a dozen reports by journalist Patrick Radden Keefe (Boston, 1976) for The New Yorker, for which he has written since 2006. As he explains in the preface, the pieces it contains reflect some of his abiding concerns: crime and corruption, secrets and lies, permeable membranes separating legitimate and illegitimate worlds, family ties and the power of denial. Keefe is the author of Say Nothing (2019), the best book I know about the Northern Ireland conflict. Therefore, it is not difficult for me to retrace the steps of an author who realizes from the first moment that we are all unreliable narrators of our own lives, and who handles the characters and their circumstances with keen observation and understanding. He empathizes with his subjects like no other, while maintaining an appropriate level of journalistic skepticism: the subjects Maleantes covers are imbued with a narrative tension that is never over-the-top or melodramatic. Due to the roles of the different heroes, the expression on the cover of the book can be a bit extreme, because in its pages they are not all strictly malevolent or criminal, as the title of the Spanish version suggests, but there are also gentle expressions. and the bandits don’t even reach his low level, as in the case of now-deceased television chef Anthony Bourdain, remaining a mischievous old rocker who suddenly turns into a wealthy nomad traveling the planet and gorging on unique foods. The title Rogues, “Pícaros” in English, is much closer to the actual content of the work.
