Böcker av Nanni Balestrini

Explosive novel of Italy's revolutionary 1969 by leading Italian novelistIt was 1969, and temperatures were rising across the factories of the north as workers demanded better pay and conditions. Soon, discontent would erupt in what became known as Italy's ';Hot Autumn.' A young worker from the impoverished south arrives at Fiat's Mirafiori factory in Turin, where his darker complexion begins to fade from the fourteen-hour workdays in sweltering industrial heat. He is frequently late for work, and sells his blood when money runs low. He fakes a crushed finger to win sick leave. His bosses try to withhold his wages. Our cynical, dry-witted narrator will not bend to their will. ';I want everything, everything that's owed to me,' he tells them. ';Nothing more and nothing less, because you don't mess with me.' Around him, students are holding secret meetings and union workers begin halting work on the assembly lines, crippling the Mirafiori factory with months of continuous strikes. Before long, barricades line the roads, tear gas wafts into private homes, and the slogan ';We Want Everything' is ringing through the streets. Wrought in spare and measured prose, Balestrini's novel depicts an explosive uprising. Introduced by Rachel Kushner, the author of the best-selling The Flamethrowers, We Want Everything is the incendiary fictional account of events that led to a decade of revolt.

For a brief explosive period in the mid-1970s, the young and the unemployed of Italy's cities joined the workers in an unexpectedly militant movement known simply as Autonomy (Autonomia). Its ';politics of refusal' united its opponents behind draconian measures more severe than any seen since the war.Nanni Balestrini, the poet of youth rebellion, himself a victim of that repression, has invented a remarkable fictional form to express the hopes and conflicts of the movement. In spare but vivid prose, The Unseen follows Autonomy's trajectory through the eyes of a single working-class protagonistfrom high-school rebellion, squatting and attempts to set up a free radio station to arrest and the brutalities of imprisonment. This is a powerful and gripping novel: a rare evocation of the intensity of commitment, the passion of politics.

A love story with infinite possibilities.