The Montreal publisher Lux is more used to publishing essays, but also the occasional novel, chosen with care, like this committed story, written by an Italian translator and journalist.
The previous title by Alberto Prunetti, Amianto: a workers’ storyrecounted the life and struggle of his father, exposed to asbestos in the factories where he worked. Lumpen Odyssey evoked the next generation of lumpenproletariat, no longer made up of workers, but of minimum wage workers, mainly in the restaurant sector.
The narrator – alter ego of the author – is a young Tuscan who, to avoid following his father’s path, decides to pursue university studies. “A child from the factories who had taken on the wings of an intellectual,” he said of himself. But his diploma is worth no more than a cabbage leaf in his native region, so he takes the plane for the first time with the intention of finding work in England.
In Bristol, he quickly became disillusioned, employed as a pizza chef or public toilet cleaner in a shopping center. Outraged by his execrable working conditions, poorly paid, exploited and monitored by his bosses, he denounces with witticisms and scathing replies what he calls the slavery of minimum wage employment, just as “the “atmosphere of stupidity” of the workplaces where he ends up.
And it is with passion and burlesque humor that this “hero of the working class” takes us into the depths of employment during a fascinating anti-Thatcherite odyssey. To discover.
Lumpen Odyssey
Lux
216 pages