Don't Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets
A novel
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- 7,99 €
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- 7,99 €
Publisher Description
Pinerolo, Italy. April 1945. At a fascist conference, a writer disappears and is found dead at the bottom of a cliff. Thirty years later, a young man—a political activist or maybe a terrorist—interviews the survivors to try to uncover the truth about what happened and its consequences. Who was this writer? What did he believe in? Why, shortly before his death, did he save a man who could have killed him? Where is his lost work? And what does any of this have to do with a teenager in contemporary Milan involved in a violent confrontation with the police? Bold and incisive, Don’t Shed Your Tears for Anyone Who Lives on These Streets is a gripping examination of art-as-politics and politics-as-crime.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pron (after My Fathers' Ghost Is Climbing in the Rain) delivers a dry study of political extremism and its intersection with literature. Pietro Linden is an Italian political activist involved with the assassination of his former fascist college professor in 1977. Though he is ordered to lie low by his government liaison, Linden, who had been secretly monitoring the professor's movements, picks up some books the professor had ordered and begins reading them, then reaching out to the authors of the books: futurist-fascist literati who were at their publishing peak in the 1940s. Linden conducts a series of exhaustive interviews with four of the authors regarding their political activism and connection to the death of author Luca Borrello at the 1945 Fascist Writers' Conference. During these interviews, Linden discovers Borrello's antifascist allegiances, and reckons with the hypocrisy of 1940s futurist-fascist literary movements and the amoral and blind passion that often accompanies extremism. As Linden begins to question his own political leanings, Pron weaves a surprising and complicated web involving Linden's antifascist, resistance fighter father who was held prisoner during a government purge in 1944, and Linden's son, the aimless protestor Tomasso, who lives in poverty and hopelessness in 2014. Disappointingly, Pron's intriguing frame is rendered lifeless with too many secondary characters. This is a dense, frustratingly erudite take on art, politics, and "writing literature into life."
