“I knew a secretary who only knew how to lick envelopes and stamps, yet she became indispensable […].”
Approaching the text was not easy. The book calls to attention all potential and future readers; it forces them to patiently interpret, with a touch of wit and irony; and it condemns them to follow the protagonist’s ebb and flow of thoughts and reflections: we are in his head, and we must deal with this from the first page to the last. Let’s accept it, let’s trust it!
So we barely saw the first chapter’s signal buoy on the horizon, then the second, and then we became enthralled… This is what may await many readers, so we invite you not to give up, but to force yourself to keep going, even if you think you’ll get stuck in the muck of dialect terminology, with an obsolete vocabulary and unstable trains of thought. It’s not an easy read, but it’s one worth the effort.
A novel with a strong autobiographical edge—and this, admittedly, makes it all the more succulent—it tells the story of a young man who leaves his provincial home in the Grosseto area, where he lives with his wife Mara and son, to move to Milan. Driven by the glare of the economic miracle (the story is set in the late 1950s), like many Italians of the time, he also attempts to carry out a plan of revenge against capitalism and rampant industrialization, plotting a shady attack in response to a workplace accident that led to the deaths of several miners. A clear political stance, with a harsh critique of labor policies where superficial wealth was a constant exploitation of the proletariat (in its broadest form), to the point of disregard for the risks they themselves would face.
Bianciardi attacks, in his own unique way, the society of consumerism and the myth of unlimited economic growth, and the dogma that productive progress can solve social problems. In a way, it’s a black-and-white version of issues that remain open today, issues that no one is committed to resolving.
The protagonist isn’t someone whose moral rectitude will make you fall in love; in fact, in Milan he has a second partner, Anna, whom, amid arguments and abortions, he will love in his own way, squandering the little money he manages to earn, yet somehow you will manage to appreciate him. Leading the reader through one train of thought after another, between harsh criticism of society or its behavior, between a boundless sense of precariousness and constant faith in the future, is a marked irony that is the narrator’s clear and evident signature, and which we so enjoyed.
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Luciano Bianciardi, La vita agra, Feltrinelli, Milano, 2018
First edition Rizzoli, 1962.