A-Infos (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria #460: Books: Review of Contrada Ulmo and other stories by Angelo Barberi - Salvatore Laneri (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

Last April, the collection Contrada Ulmo and other stories, Angelo 
Barberi's first literary work, was published by Sicilia Punto L. As 
announced on the back cover of the volume, the nine stories that make up 
this collection, although unrelated to each other in terms of plots, 
reveal themselves to be rooted in a common literary and political 
substratum, since they narrate the events of individuals and communities 
that in the variety of social circumstances pertaining to the Sicilian 
context, but with extensions to the national and international ones, 
"fight for a more just society and clash with a protean power that 
pursues its interests, trampling on rights and existences". The 
political and social conflict recurs transversally throughout the work, 
from time to time declined in themes of insistent topicality: whether 
they are activists against the construction of a military base, a crowd 
of protesters shouting for justice for a migrant and trade unionist who 
disappeared into thin air, a citizens' committee against the high cost 
of bills or an entire country grappling with elections and suspicious 
tumors, what emerges from one story to another is in fact the portrait 
of the working classes grappling with the injustices suffered or the 
impending threats; and this attempt, in the very modest opinion of the 
writer, constitutes the essential thematic framework within which to 
probe the deepest meaning of Barberi's work, suggesting a reading in a 
decidedly veristic key.

The stories of Contrada Ulmo, taking on the characteristics of effective 
and powerful short stories, express in the clear linearity of the 
narrative plots the stylistic adherence to the intention of providing a 
portrait of the working classes in contemporary reality, starting from 
the existential hypotheses embodied in the characters in revolt; and it 
is for the same reason that the narrator's voice seems to want to merge 
with that of his characters until it disappears into the blanket of 
events, adopting registers and narrative techniques that attempt (with 
the same limitations found in late nineteenth-century verism) to 
mimetically replicate its linguistic variables. The general style of the 
work therefore appears as varied as the humanity that animates these 
short stories, of which it intends to reflect the instincts and reveal 
the ambitions, demonstrating an empathetic capacity that becomes 
particularly intense in the diptych of stories dedicated to the female 
figures of Signora C. and Rita.

From the point of view of narrative content, Angelo Barberi's short 
stories, far from limiting themselves to the superficial representation 
of the subaltern masses as a presumed self-sufficient political subject, 
attempt an admirable because reliable restitution of the daily 
difficulties of individuals who decide to join these masses or not; and 
it is precisely around this fragile dialectic between individual and 
collectivity that the most painful aspect of the social and political 
reflection offered by this volume seems to unfold. From the courageous 
mobilization of the NO MUOS activists in the short story that opens the 
collection and gives it its title, to the final portrait of an 
exhausting day of work in a chaotic auto parts store, this collection 
invites us to lucidly contemplate the difficulties that cross our lives 
and those of others, suggesting how every personal condition can or 
cannot be expressed in a common action; and in this sense the most 
urgent fight of the characters in these short stories is not the one 
against war, poor health care, pollution, unemployment or precarious 
work that kills every day, but rather the transversal and continuous 
battle that each of us must fight against the ghosts of defeatism, 
fatalism and unconditional surrender to the depressing state of things 
present.

The realistic representation of subaltern realities did not aspire to 
propose a possibility of redemption, fossilizing the dynamics of 
injustice and abuse in the presumed, irremediable cyclicality of 
resigned immobility. Although dampened at various moments by the 
enthusiasm of the struggle, the severity of this social and existential 
vision marked by resignation seems to invest Barberi's short stories 
too, where the tenacity of the characters gathered in a community 
clashes with police violence and corruption, individual psychosis and 
the sense of impotence, the illness and death that loom. A fundamental 
proof of the political consistency of this work is however the author's 
sincere belonging to the verisimilitude of the social realities, events 
and characters present in his stories, in substantial opposition to the 
paternalism of the veristic approach; and this adhesion, existential 
even before cultural, is already in itself an eminently political fact, 
since it supports and consolidates the explicit intention to denounce, 
by describing them, the unfair living conditions to which the working 
classes are subjected in contemporary times.

It remains to be asked to what extent the verist legacy traced here 
(assuming that this interpretation is reliable) constitutes a burden 
that must be urgently freed or the springboard for a new wave of 
libertarian literature that has not only the honesty to be indignant and 
shed light on the current state of affairs, but also the ambition to 
openly subvert them, providing fictions that compensate for the apparent 
inevitability of reality and indicate new paths, suggesting unlimited 
possibilities for redemption against injustice. In the meantime, in 
addition to expressing the hope of reading new stories by our author as 
soon as possible, I invite all readers to walk through this sincere, 
scrupulous and delicate gallery of the daily heroism that surrounds us 
and of which we also have the courage to be a part every now and then.

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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