I take the dream of one thing and I can't dodge some nostalgia. It will be a little nostalgia for the old days, a belief that what has gone is cleaner than what is gone. As Maria Isabel Llaudes said, all past time seems better to us. After all, we referred to a delicious and glorious time in which we put more seriously the snout in this thing in literature, everything was new, every illusion. But, no matter how hard the work is, no matter how objectively it looks, the feeling seems to me to have something of a truth. It's not just a silly nostalgia, but a comparative critique. At that time, appreciable translations were made – recalls Miguel Torga and the Bestias, the great Agota Kristof and Cuaderno, Josef Skvorecky and the Bitter World – and the paraliteration accompanied identifiable collections, erect covers, friendly to touch – that unconfessable vice. I've heard of a writer who wanted to publish it for them.
However, an element that puts a stop to this view is introduced: When I was 14 years old, to see if the reading holds up, to see if this reader that I've become has not become too big. I remembered it as an exciting account of the dream of something, of young people who are born into life. Pasolini's first published novel captures the times when the writer was young, the Friuli of northeastern Italy, and the same Friulan, sometimes, after the Second World War. Young people are Communists, not so much because of their ideology, but because of the demands of social conditions, rural workers; they cannot, in the people, take the path of emigration, to Yugoslavia – where there is at least communism – to Switzerland, to return home with their heads. Because, here and there, above all, far from everyday anguish, it is freedom what you are looking at. And it’s true, it’s not a
no-round novel – and perhaps less bad. It's more like four beats. If you want, technically, the most lame are the most obvious, the deficiencies are more than the ellipses. But, on the other hand, how well this post-war environment gathers, a context without being completely invaded by industrialization, in which there have been hardly any changes over the time when life has advanced. As the translator Zabaleta points out in a very interesting preamble, which could also be the post-war atmosphere here, only modified by Nini Australia, Milio Bortolus and Elect Pereisson, and instead, for example, Amado, Demetrio and our Felix. After 14 years, we can still smell freedom, not so thirsty, but hunger.