Questo paese è tutto quello che ci è dato vedere dell'universo, prima di attraversare il capannone dove stiamo come le bestie che devono, le bestie che devono stare per forza, e la nostra vita è lì, tutta nei pannelli di truciolare, nei lettini che costruiamo con la precisione disperata di chi si sta disfando, di chi sta a guardare lo sfaldarsi della propria inutile, miserrima vita.
(Emanuele Tonon)
On the literary side, here in Italy, there aren't yet important works about the world of the new economy. But many pages were spent to tell the condition of precarious workers, in particular employees of call centers (ironically, portions of the Olivetti factory in Pozzuoli and, news of the end of 2010, also the historic headquarters in Via Jervis in Ivrea are used today as call centers).
On the theme of work, in the panorama of Italian contemporary litterature, a remarkable book was pubblished, always set in a factory, this time in the North East. The factory connects the fate of fathers, unskilled workers, to the fate of sons, graduated but, however, without other employment possibilities in the region of Friuli, always the contrary of Ivrea because of the production areas divided as colonial monocultures. The novel is Il Nemico by Emanuele Tonon. It's inspired by autobiographical episodes, but real life contents are transformed though the language and the narrative tecnique. It's a dense work that describes the Friuli of the past through the figure of a father, an unconscious Don Quixote, and the contemporary reality by projecting the present Friuli in the inner world of the narrator who moves his discomfort and anger in the conflict with God. The book does not tell a story in the sense traditional sense, but through a succession of descriptions and streams of consciousness the reader collects informations about the lives of the characters. The climax of the book are the consequences of few dramatic events on the psyche of the characters.
The book recalls Memoriale by Volponi, not only because they are both set in a factory, but especially for the use of a hallucinated narrator that sees in the surrounding world the reflection of his pain. The heir of Albino Saluggia received high school education so the deep degree of introspective awareness is justified, while in Memoriale the critics often attacked the level of selfconsciounsness of the working-class main character .
Il Nemico is a book full of literary references, biblical and philosophical, but naturally suggested. Infact the empathy of the reader does not lean in a shared destiny, but in the common cultural background that includes classic literature as well ad parables learned during catechism lessons as well as online pornography.
So, if Saluggia's story wasn't commonly read between those who were workers at the time of the book, Il Nemico is a voice for the generation of those who now are thirty or forty years old, well educated, capable of self-analysis, that are simultaneously facing, as the protagonist of the novel, the death of their parents, an alienating job and the problem of infertility:
la sezionatrice a controllo numerico serie MTR (monoasse a tavola rotante) è la macchina che ci tiene in questo mondo. La tavola rotante, la giostra come la chiamo io, perché, a volte, durante la manutenzione ordinaria, andiamo a pulire tutta la segatura e la polvere incrostata sulla macchina. La mia sposa sale sulla tavola dove provvederà a usare la pistola ad aria compressa negli interstizi e sulla tavola stessa. Lei sta lì, in piedi, con le sue gambe di gazzella, e io aziono il comando di rotazione della tavola. Le faccio fare qualche giro e lei sembra quasi che sorrida [...]
