preface to the novel West Indies (Campanotto, 2008) Giancarlo Micheli
review as published in the journal
La Mosca di Milano (n.21, Edizioni La Vita Felice, Milano 2009)
Indie occidentali di Giancarlo Micheli
(Campanotto editore, Pasian di Prato UD, settembre 2008, ppg. 224)
prefazione di Manlio Cancogni
Oggi il Lower East Side è un quartiere di artisti, gallerie d’arte e ricostruzioni edilizie. Quando abitavo a New York, durante gli anni settanta del secolo scorso, era invece un quartiere a rischio. Mia figlia mi raccomandava di evitarlo nelle quotidiane passeggiate che facevo assieme a mia moglie. Dalla Third Avenue, dove avevamo casa, eravamo soliti discendere per la Bowery, per poi prendere per Canal Street e deviare per Mott o Mulberry Street, fino nel cuore di Little Italy che, proprio allora, cominciava ad essere erosa dall’avanzata irresistibile dei cinesi di Chinatown. Oggi il territorio è quasi interamente conquistato. Credo rimanga ancora qualche trattoria in cui gli italiani figurano come prestanome di proprietari di Shanghai o di Canton.
Proprio in Mulberry Street sta il bar dei protagonisti del romanzo Indie occidentali: Aurelio ed Erminia, una coppia di giovani sposi che dalla Valle del Serchio si aggiungono, nei primi anni del novecento, alle moltitudini di immigrati che arrivavano ad Ellis Island dall’Italia o dalla Germania, dall’Europa dell’est o dalla Scandinavia. I personaggi della storia di Micheli do not belong to the mass of the dispossessed in those frenzied years of industrial development crossed the Atlantic to find in a modern Babel, crowded up to capacity, especially abundant reasons for unpublished trials and sufferings. Aurelio and Erminia have sufficient resources to undertake a self-employed once they arrive in the New World. Party led by the desire to advance human and donate to his newborn daughter a place more comfortable and worthy. Come, first, in the shadow of a protective kind of ambiguous clan leader, an intermediary between the workforce, and hardships often experienced by the hungry and unscrupulous businessmen, easily inclined to compromise with crime.
They will, therefore, soon the cost of its naivety, ignorance of the dynamics of their violent and merciless that inform the relationships in the community that welcomes them. Only the screening of a hellish journey that will lead them in the torments of the Chicago Stockyards and unhealthy factories of the textile industry of New Jersey, they crown their initiatory path, gain self-awareness and
the ability to act together to others to affirm shared values \u200b\u200band human progress. This is the key story of utopian Micheli developed with meticulous craftsmanship, a writer by vocation, advice, therefore, a reflective reading of this novel, proportionate to the care that has been used in writing it.
The novel has a definitely realistic, sometimes surreal warp the fabric of cases ineffable emotions and gestures of the characters. Micheli will recompose a vigorous passions of human geography and noble feelings, so that leaves us strong, the taste of a history of the past. The Authority shall act according to strategies subtle, even mysterious, which illuminate the facts of the story with uncanny reflections of a necessity, often absurd, the light of dawn, however, from which you can pick up signs also important to better understand the our present, very cloudy and night.
It's amazing how the U.S. invaded in the late nineteenth century by a crowd of hopeless and overwhelmed, belonging to a myriad of irreconcilable differences of cultures and languages, forced into a merciless struggle for life, it's amazing how this country has survived. An application is mandatory: today the situation in the U.S. and the world has changed from the ruthless and dramatic picture that the novel describes? Certainly the society is moved to a stage "civil" rules accepted and shared, but the democratic world is no longer dominated by industrial production, but the production of money as an end in itself, and therefore senseless, evil and diabolical. It comforts us to think that this moment in history will be overcome and we hope that this will happen without a disaster.
Manlio Cancogni
"West Indies" by Giancarlo Micheli (Campanotto publisher, Pasian di Prato, Udine, September 2008, ppg. 224)
http: / / www.ibs.it/code/9788845610042/micheli-giancarlo/indie-occidentali.html
http://www.bol.it/libri/Indie-occidentali/Giancarlo-Micheli/ea978884561004/
http://www.libreriauniversitaria.it/indie-occidentali-micheli-giancarlo-campanotto/libro/9788845610042
http://www.webster.it/libri-indie_occidentali_micheli_giancarlo_campanotto-9788845610042.htm
http://www.amazon.it/Indie-occidentali-Narrativa-Giancarlo-Micheli/dp/8845610047/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1291729036&sr=1-2
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