Alberto Prunetti (Amianto) lived in London in the 1980s. He didn’t speak English, far from it, but that didn’t stop him from going from little job to little job. The first academic from a working-class family in Tuscany, he recounts this prolific period in Lumpen Odyssey. Memories that are both entertaining and socially engaged, hilarious and touching, in which the language of Molière is mixed with those of Shakespeare and Dante, which slip into it, intertwine, collide with it. The result, at first unsettling, quickly reveals a unique color and beauty. The style could have been cacophonous. He is jubilant. And as truculent as the other exiles the narrator meets while going from one job to another. Pizza maker. Toilet scrubber. Raspberry picker. At the beginning and end of the story, Prunetti evokes his father. This proud man anchored in tradition thus appears as a parenthesis which opens and closes the life of his son in a foreign land. We don’t just laugh and smile in this odyssey.
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