We Want Everything

by Nanni Balestrini, Rachel Kushner (Introduction)

Overview

The explosive novel of Italy’s revolutionary 1969

It was 1969, and temperatures were rising across the factories of the north as workers demanded better pay and conditions. Soon, discontent would erupt in what became known as Italy’s Hot Autumn. A young worker from the impoverished south arrives at Fiat’s Mirafiori factory in Turin, where his darker complexion begins to fade from the fourteen-hour workdays in sweltering industrial heat. His bosses try to withhold his wages. Our cynical, dry-witted narrator will not bend to their will. “I want everything, everything that’s owed to me,” he tells them. “Nothing more and nothing less, because you don’t mess with me.”

Around him, students are holding secret meetings and union workers begin halting work on the assembly lines, crippling the Mirafiori factory with months of continuous strikes. Before long, barricades line the roads, tear gas wafts into private homes, and the slogan “We Want Everything” is ringing through the streets.

Wrought in spare and measured prose, Balestrini’s novel depicts an explosive uprising. Introduced by Rachel Kushner, the author of the best-selling The Flamethrowers, We Want Everything is the incendiary fictional account of events that led to a decade of revolt.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784783693
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	04/12/2022
Series:	Verso Fiction
Pages:	224
Sales rank:	675,616
Product dimensions:	5.09(w) x 7.79(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Nanni Balestrini was born in Milan in 1935 and was a member of the influential avant-garde Gruppo 63, along with Umberto Eco and Eduardo Sanguineti. He is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, including Blackout and Ipocalisse, and novels such as Tristano, Vogliamo Tutto, and La Violenza Illustrata.

During the notorious mass arrests of writers and activists associated with Autonomy, which began in 1979, Balestrini was charged with membership of an armed organization and with subversive association. He went underground to avoid arrest and fled to France. As in so many other cases, no evidence was provided and he was acquitted of all the charges.

He died in Rome in 2019.

Editorial Reviews

A fine example of a literary use of expressions that were then burgeoning in factories and mass meetings, caught between student unrest and worker fury.”
—Umberto Eco, author of The Name of the Rose

“In this fierce, compelling novel, Balestrini has found a way to individualise the universal, and universalise the individual, creating a document of the Italian labour struggles of the 1970s that has great value both as art and history. Balestrini becomes a channel for the working-class narrator, who stands for all the Southern masses who come north to the car factories to participate in the Italian ‘economic miracle.’ It’s a book which charted a new course for fiction, one that deserves further exploration.”
—Hari Kunzru, author of Gods Without Men

“We would do well to study how it was that Balestrini made politics and fiction and art, all in once place … one of the most compelling pieces of literature of the entire second half of the twentieth century.”
—Rachel Kushner, New Yorker

“One of the best novels of 2016 … Nothing could seem further from or more relevant to our historical moment.”
—Chicago Tribune

“Only Balestrini … has succeeded in reconciling the tragic—epic spirit of the revolutionary movement and the ironic—combinatorial spirit of literary experimentation … [We Want Everything] is probably the most important Italian literary work of the 1960s.”
—Franco “Bifo” Berardi, author of Heroes and The Soul at Work

“We Want Everything dramatically and ecstatically captures a historical moment. It is an exciting tale resplendent in emotion about a movement that engulfed the factories of Italy in the late 1960s and was part of a greater political and cultural challenge to the überlords of the world’s capitalist class”
—Ron Jacobs, Counterpunch

“As demands arise again that echo the demands of the period—less work, more pay, more leisure, guaranteed income—We Want Everything sends a stirring reminder that these are not new demands, and that although it is a new generation rising to the challenge, it is the same fundamental struggle that continues.”
—PopMatters

“Balestrini was present during the ‘Hot Autumn’ he depicts in this arresting novel, and he follows the young Italian workers with a clear eye and spare prose.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

From the Publisher

04/25/2016
First published in Italy in 1971, and now available for the first time for U.S. readers, this novel unveils a fictionalized version of Italy’s historic “hot autumn” of 1969, when workers around the nation protested for better working conditions and wages. Balestrini (Tristano) splits his story into two parts, with each narrated by the same unnamed young man from southern Italy. The first part is both wry and charming as the narrator bumbles from one job to the next, frequently complaining with a crass, blunt mouth about various inadequacies that prevent him from employment bliss. “Everything had a price,” he claims, and he judges worth on material objects. Before long, he flees to the north, eventually finding work assembling automobiles at a Fiat plant in Turin. After feigning injury to exploit the company’s medical leave program, he helps organize a massive strike for non-union workers against the company, arguing for better benefits. The second part of the novel follows the strike closely, and the narrator’s voice transitions from jocular bluntness into one of war reporter, with brief bursts of information on groups and departments joining in “the struggle” for equality. This compelling novel works well as both historic relic and parallel to many contemporary workplace conflicts. (June)

Publishers Weekly