Works

With writing as original as a classic jazz piece, in this autobiographical novel Vitaliano Trevisan recounts work in a place where it is a religion, the North-East, from the 1970s to the 2000s. Through this lens, he explores not only the changes in our country, but also his own life: the failure of love, the mechanisms of power hidden in every relationship, the history of his own and every family, which is always “a story of money”. “Why do I always find a job?”, I asked myself. ‘Why don’t they let me drift away in peace? Become a tramp. One of the possibilities I contemplated. That I still contemplate. But then I don’t have the courage. I think of my father, Arturo the policeman, and his uniform, always impeccable; and my grandfather, the dignity with which he wore his Sunday best. Absurdities that always come back to me. “The origin is a suit that one never takes off”. Vitaliano Trevisan’s entirely human condemnation to work began at the age of fifteen, when one evening at dinner he asked his father for a new boy’s bicycle, because riding his older sister’s meant being teased by his friends. In response, his father took him to the workshop of a friend who stamped metal sheets for bird baths: “So you understand where it comes from,” he said, alluding to money. The author began a “career” that was a succession of false starts: from labourer to sailboat builder, from waiter to surveyor, from unemployed to ice cream vendor in Germany, from warehouse worker to night porter, to drug dealing and theft, “a trade that obeys the same bloody market rules”. Trevisan recounts the 1970s, crushed between politics and heroin, which he seems to have survived almost by chance, the story of a marriage and its end, the contradictions of the world of culture – where, ironically, the most repeated phrase is “there is no money”, the same one his father used to tell him – and the mental suffering, the derailed journey of a boy destined to become a writer.