"All the stuff, all the wealth that we make is ours. Enough. We can’t stand it any more, we can’t just be stuff too, goods to be sold. Vogliamo tutto — We want everything. All the wealth, all the power, and no work. What does work mean to us. They’d had it up to here, they wanted to fight not because of work, not because the boss is bad, but because the boss and work exist."

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"All the stuff, all the wealth that we make is ours. Enough. We can’t stand it any more, we can’t just be stuff too, goods to be sold. Vogliamo tutto — We want everything. All the wealth, all the power, and no work. What does work mean to us. They’d had it up to here, they wanted to fight not because of work, not because the boss is bad, but because the boss and work exist."

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The introduction by Sonya Jeffrey is excellent, the description of Nanni Balestrini's work and the shift in the ideological chart of the world from the 70's and onward. A book about the struggle at the Fiat Mirafiori plant and a descriptive journey of the rise of the poor in societies where the rich have it all. The title we want it all! ( )

I picked this up from the New Books shelf at the library, I had no idea what I was getting into – it was a simple case of being attracted by its unusual cover and its Italian title. It turned out to be a kind of novelistic call-to-arms for economic reform, and it’s the first book of just two that have been issued by Melbourne micro publisher, Telephone Publishing. But it’s a book that made quite a splash: there is an enthusiastic review by Chris Deti at Readings and it was Cameron Woodhead’s Pick of the Week at the SMH. The reason for this turns out to be that Nanni Balestrini is an author of some considerable literary significance, and although the book is decades old (though only just translated into English) it is right now of political significance too.
All those people who think that Booker shortlistee Lincoln in the Bardo is innovative because it consists of a collage of historical sources, well, no, that technique was done before by Balestrini in this novel nearly half a century ago in 1971. In the foreword, Franco Berardi explains that Balestrini’s genius lies in the way he has dealt with the tensions between content and form within postwar Italian writing. His content depicts not individuals but rather social classes in turmoil, as manifested in this novel in protests on the streets of the city. What is unique, Berardi says, is that Balestrini combines this content with a form usually kept separate: his language and style keeps time with the rhythm of the industrial city of this period, and he achieves this by creating a collage from interviews with workers, from flyers and bulletins, and from minutes of workers’ meetings.

Balestrini is the first poet who has never written a single word of his own, because for him words are material to recombine. The poet’s gesture consists in gathering words from the boundless verbal territory, in arranging their function, their rhythm and therefore their emotional power. (p.xiv)

So much for George Saunders being ‘experimental’, eh? (And I said so in my review at Goodreads when I abandoned Lincoln in the Bardo, back in August, before ever I read Balestrini. I had, after all, read Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich, who also predates Saunders’ use of the technique in her ‘novels’.)
In Vogliamo Tutto, Balestrini’s technique comes in for a little bit of criticism at Goodreads, which is worth responding to, IMO. Amongst the enthusiasts for its political message (bear with me, I’m coming to that) a reader complains of repetition of the content, and it is certainly true that there is a great deal of repetition especially in the second part of the book, yes, to the point of tedium. But Berardi says that this repetition arises from the author’s deliberate process:

…the rhythmic emotion that issues from the flux: surges, retreats, eddies, interruptions, jumps. Balestrini’s work is all concentrated on the rhythm. Words are nothing more than blocks of elemental material to collect directly from reality. (p.xiv)

So, ok, what’s this book with its significant form about, and why is it so relevant now?
To read the rest of my review please visit https://anzlitlovers.com/2017/10/08/vogliamo-tutto-we-want-everything-by-nanni-b... ( )