Workers’ novel – La Stampa

I am asbestos-rising steel,” writes Alberto Prunetti about himself. An opening sentence. Instead, asbestos, a mineral with killer fibers, isn’t included in the title until more than halfway through the memoir. And rightly so. Because the hero of the book is Renato, Alberto’s father, a pipe welder, a metalworker through and through, a life full of sparks from the welding machine, with industrial fumes, heavy metals, with the thin asbestos that was supposed to protect against immediate fire and instead kills him slowly and prematurely at the age of 59. The author projects him onto the stage in the pose of a Polycletian statue in chiasmus, one knee bent, more waiting than resting. And off we go: “Grab the grinding wheel: With a blow of the hammer on the head of a screwdriver with a slanted handle, in the opposite direction of rotation, loosen the ring that fixes the brush and insert it.” Cutting disc. Then he pushes the switch up with his gloved thumb. The blade immediately begins to rotate at a speed of ten thousand revolutions per minute. Bring the disk closer to the gray tube. Upon contact with the blade, the sound changes, turning into a metallic scream, followed by an explosion of sparks and the rise of a dry shower of fibrous and regular particles.

The gestures are precise, ​​measured in detail, as befits a “working class hero” from Livorno, always on the move and dealing with the industrial chimera, a “legionnaire” (that is how veterans in factory and called a refinery), to a frontline worker who keeps his tools as efficient as the weapons of a protagonist from spaghetti westerns, the films that Renato and Alberto devour together with the family. Unfortunately, the fibrous and poisoned arrows fall on the ground and on people. All it takes is for them to get stuck in the trachea and cause a tumor decades later. So there is also fate in this counter-epic (Prunetti prefers to call it a “raging epic”) and class fates return to the bookstore, in a society that is increasingly less mobile and increasingly marked by deaths at work (80 on average). victims per month in the first half of 2023, according to INAIL data).

It is the case asbestos, published in 2012 and 2014 by small publishers such as Agenzia. Books such as: B. appear at the festivals The passion for renewal. My years in Federmeccanica by Fabio Storchi, published last year by Marsilio, tells the changes in the world of work from a different perspective than that of the Prunetti family. It’s not just an Italian trend. The Englishman Allen Lane releases in October Beauty lies in the street (Beauty is on the way) by Joachim Haeberlen, in which the squares and streets of Europe, which have been in turmoil since the middle of the last century, primarily for social reasons, flow by like a montage from a film. While the next edition of Bristol’s Class Festival (which was a huge success when it launched in 2021) has been postponed until autumn next year, the working-class literary festival Campi Bisenzio, run by Prunetti himself, attracted a demonstration audience to the GNK factory last spring . Last year the Tuscan writer managed to get it published by Bompiani To the line, a work in free verse by his French friend Joseph Ponthus, who was trained as a specialist educator and worked as a temporary worker in a fish cannery to follow the woman he loved to Brittany. The production line links gestures and thoughts, but allows poetry to emerge. It was a bestseller in France. After the book was published, Ponthus, who died in 2021, was fired from the Breton factory.

The new proletarians are not just workers. In the same days as Amianto, it was published by Mondadori The boss by Francesco Pacifico: Characters from popular and middle-class backgrounds face each other, all caught up in a conspiracy of subtle blackmail as well as psychological and sexual abuse. “The Italian office manager is a figure that has not yet been explored much. I learned that an old friend has become one of those bosses who yells at newly hired girls. Colleagues find her in line at the toilet, waiting to sit on the toilet lid and cry. This is how the Roman author begins and the style seems to be that of denunciation literature; Then the story of the protagonist Gaia, who meets the writer-confessor on a very empty night during the first lockdown, takes on surreal nuances. André Breton’s strange rendezvous with crazy Nadja comes to mind. In the pages of Pacifico, the foundation where Gaia works manages to radiate its labyrinths outward, and existences are revealed in a game of Chinese boxes parallel to that which governs multinational corporations. The monster is here too. In Prunetti’s book, a Ligurian refinery looks like a dragon; In Pacifico, the abuse beast consists of two bodies embraced by demonic possession. Gaia disappears from the fading fiction-truth. In 2021, a Supreme Court ruling found a link between office bullying and suicide.

Prunetti with a 60 on his high school diploma, the scholarship drunk in the bars of the Maremma, the festivals, the translations, the many books you read to avoid fate – “I feel more like Jack London’s nephew than like that of Emile Zola” – today, he thinks, he himself is a cognitive proletarian with a damaged back and little income. “Today in Italy, construction is the riskiest environment, but in countries where controls are more relaxed, such as India and Brazil, asbestos exposure still occurs,” he says. His memoirs indirectly tell of the crisis of the labor aristocracy to which his father belonged, of the wild globalization of work, of migrations, relocations and lost social conquests. When you read the stories between hyperrealism and hallucination Deepak Unnikrishnan in Temporary Life (Waterlines, 2017) about the semi-slave conditions of the workers of the Indian subcontinent in the service of the architectural hubris of the Gulf Emirates makes one shudder with shame. And it seems like you’re peering into an unknown social world to scroll through the verses New workers, Migrant worker poets of neo-Confucian and capital communist China, for example in the poems of Xiao Hai: “All we can do is let the secret of these words/Made in China/ proudly fill every river that flows/into the four oceans. “and on the seven continents.” Pride and despair unite in the poetic assembly line. Lives of opaque appearance that, once rubbed by history, shine; Deaths that we should no longer call white (or maybe we should, because white is the color of ghosts).

Alberto Prunetti gave Renato poetic justice. An old Brazilian song by Chico Buarque sounds in your ears again, construction (Construction): An anonymous worker climbs a scaffolding, builds “magic walls”, stumbles into the sky like a drunk and flies into the air like a bird, only to fall to the ground like a limp package and die by his hand, “disturbing”. the Saturday”. These days, perhaps the point of a workers’ literature, not just the workers’, is to disrupt the increasingly less cheerful Western Saturdays.