«Diario mio e di tutti». ‘Pane duro’ di Silvio Micheli

Abstract

The debut book by the forgotten author Silvio Micheli, Pane duro (Turin 1946), winner of the Viareggio Prize just resurrected after the war, is a genuine neo-realist fresco that describes the «vita pratica» of «gente sconsiderata, sperduta nel vortice della vita, gente sfruttata, oppressa, dilaniata» in the period between the late 1930s and the Resistance. The anonymous protagonist, employed in a factory, autobiographical projection of the writer, is the representative of a community oppressed by a social, political and economic «system» which she cannot rebel against. To this anonymous crowd, alienated by the barbarous conditions of life, the man tries to give voice through a novel that matures during the war experience and significantly entitled Diario mio e di tutti, to seal the identity between individual destiny and universal history, testimony of a world that suffers abuses, injustices, war. The chorus is explained thanks to the special condition of the protagonist, a survivor, who lived at the limit between the condition of the “saved” and the “submerged” and for this reason he’s able to rise as particular voice of a collective experience. This effort is also witnessed by the linguistic face, which attempts a camouflage of reality with a mixture of sublime style and humble style, a symbol of the intention to insert the objective reproduction of the facts into an established linguistic-literary tradition.