Den ha recensito We want everything di Nanni Balestrini
Flashes of Brilliance
3 stelle
Vogliamo Tutto ("We Want Everything") is the rallying cry of the workers in Nanni Balestrini's initially brilliant fictionalized account of Italy's Hot Autumn, a workers uprising centered around the country's large auto plants feeding on exploitation of displaced labor in a time of massive social transition.
The first several chapters are worth reading both for a sparse, novel approach to narration, and the straightforward expression of the ways in which workers understand their own exploitation without the need for theory or a hierarchical movement.
The narrative technique comes across as common talk, without literary pretension, as if the narrator were talking off your ear at a bar. In the early going, it's exhilarating, even if the translation (which somehow won an award for Italian prose translation) stumbles and mixes register, making the narrator sometimes speak like an educated Brit.
That's forgivable, but as the book progresses, it strangely wanders from …
Vogliamo Tutto ("We Want Everything") is the rallying cry of the workers in Nanni Balestrini's initially brilliant fictionalized account of Italy's Hot Autumn, a workers uprising centered around the country's large auto plants feeding on exploitation of displaced labor in a time of massive social transition.
The first several chapters are worth reading both for a sparse, novel approach to narration, and the straightforward expression of the ways in which workers understand their own exploitation without the need for theory or a hierarchical movement.
The narrative technique comes across as common talk, without literary pretension, as if the narrator were talking off your ear at a bar. In the early going, it's exhilarating, even if the translation (which somehow won an award for Italian prose translation) stumbles and mixes register, making the narrator sometimes speak like an educated Brit.
That's forgivable, but as the book progresses, it strangely wanders from occasional narration that never reaches the heights of the opening chapters to a meandering, repetitive chronicle of events such as which shifts at the plant went on strike for how many hours.
It no longer reads like a man telling you about his life, but rather a very tedious diary, with occasional flashes of interest, especially toward the end when the major conflict with police and the carabinieri heats up.
I'm glad to have read it, but it would have benefited from judicious editing and a better ear for working class speech.