From Hero to Villain

From Hero to Villain

By: Erreh Svaia

Caprine Dispersion

There are writers with the ability to take us to the limit with their novels, JG Ballard, one of my favorites took things so far that Crash became a squeezing film directed by the great David Cronenberg, Irvine Welsh brought us the groundbreaking brilliant Trainspotting, Breat Easton Ellis brought out the underground decadence under the American dream in his mythical Less Than Zero and Chuck Palahniuk brought us an immortal classic of the modern era with Fight Club, controversial with adrenaline splashing behind each of the pages of his novels, iconoclasts and raw, their stories come out from the forbidden, exploit our curiosity and become essential pieces of our times, we could talk about writers who have gone even further, Charles Bukowski and his stories of wanderings through bars and streets of bad luck written under the influence of alcohol, and the Norwegian writer Karl Ove Knausgaard who has become a phenomenon or world with its endless autobiography stridently titled, My Struggle.

Someone who will probably enter this category of radical literary extremism with singular strength will be Nicholas "Nico" Walker, his most recent book "Cherry", is an accelerated journey through the fast-paced life of a man who suffers a bitter love disappointment, abandons the school and enlisted in the army to be sent to the terrible war in Iraq as a doctor where he becomes a war hero, where the depression in the face of the horrors he witnesses, makes him addicted to heroin, vice he does not manage to abandon and that leads him to become a bank robber in order to maintain his vice, sounds like Greek tragedy, but the strongest note is the fact that Walker wrote this novel on an old typewriter from the Ashland Federal Prison in Kentucky, where Walker is serving a sentence for assaulting 10 banks in order to sustain his addiction to heroin, a heartbreaking semi-autobiography that was possible thanks to the insistence of an editorial agent, Matthew Johnson, a fan of the stories of ex-combatants, who maintained contact with Walker and sent him books and notes in order to get Walker interested in writing a novel based on his life, novel that has become a resounding success, cheered by the reading public and whose abundant profits have been used voluntarily by Walker to pay the stolen money to the banks that assault.

Walker considers Cherry as a "semi autobiography" due to the fact that today he considers himself a totally different person than the one he used to be, and the one described in his novel, still pending two more years of sentence, so it is difficult we will see in the short term to Walker promote his book of strange survival, part Ernest Hemingway and his heartbreaking chronicles about the war, part Charles Bukowski and his stories of decadence and addiction, in the end, his entire book is a fierce battle between a young man and his own demons, paradoxically is also a very current and vibrant story of the so-called "American dream", unlike his words as assailant who used to say to cashiers: "It's nothing personal", Cherry is a deeply personal novel, with a literary power that elevates it beyond the simple autobiography, is an epic story of a hero turned villain.