A near bassist and music addicted, who, like in a
show – down, challenges by using vigorous and rough glissando that false rethoric related to the more abused issue about unemployment. |
Forget about anything you thought you knew. Once you meet Aiace Pellicciotto, a true dropout by choice or for his own survival, any degree of certainty about topics like dignity, prejudice, uncertainty of labour relations as well as of personal relationships, or the private and silent sense of loss, will be wiped out in one second. |
Aiace Pellicciotto is definitely a 40-year-old man, a failed bassist, an individual who carries on by subtraction without delay, and who admits frankly to have lost his own job: “slowly, inevitably, in a sordid manner”. But he’s much more than this. Well, that’s because Aiace Pellicciotto is what anyone of us could hide emotionally if we were pushed against a mirror to count all the signs impressed on our face after one hundred battles fought with bare hands, or after holding a meaningless conversation together with fugitive and unconnected actors who can’t even imagine what’s inside you. So only by reading all the chapters of the book “Professione Drop-out” (Profession as dropout), a collection of short stories which develops like a short novel built with the real life of this brave and unrepentant loser – we’re aimless leaping into a narrative rhythm spelled through the contradictions. |
These are actual dialectic quarrels which push down without compassion on the gas pedal of the absurd: some introspective moments are alternated with phases of pure entertainment with a hint of ironic and never glossy lyricism but always hungry for words that like a hatchet are able to carve your flesh as well as to give form and substance the obsessional thinking showed by the protagonist. A man who’s hovering between the self-destruction and his survival instinct to go against everyone and everything. We’re talking about some cold hard thoughts, but nevertheless honest, of a person who’s aware of being marginal, and he fights to remain so. |
The style of writing goes along with the irriverence of Aiace, the unexpressed violence of the maverick for vocation, which is on the verge of exploding at any time because all that he feels is the reflection of a warped reality, the one experienced through the eyes and the sensibility of a man who’s ready to give up everything except his own dignity. And he goes to extremes to prove it. His character is partially responsible for that, because it doesn’t allow him to leave footprints on his path but only shadows, the ones of memories or failed ambitions but most of all those ones of absences. All the women whom he chase are only projections of one obsession, that of failure. And this is why all the dialogues with potential employers or with friends/known associates turn out to be hilarious, because they run along the twin-track of sarcasm and impudence which are typical of those kind of people with nothing to lose. The provocation is always around the corner and draws inspiration from britain literary movement of Angry Young Men (John Osborne, John Braine...) and it also pays tribute to the gloomy and nostalgic scene of the writer Stig Dagerman, many times mentioned in the book, but by indulging in some musical atmosphere where the groove of the electric and upright bass push deeply into the textures of the story, supporting it as only both instruments can do within the harmonic structure of a song. |
All the names of the bassists which follow each other so as to impress the change of accent and tone into the body of narration seem to testify the fluctuating path taken by Aiace. Sometimes it happens to dream even to himself, which means to abandon the worn-out uniform of a job that no longer has, so as to wear a camel coat, the same as Daniele Dominici’s in “La Prima Notte di Quiete”; we can figure the scene, he’s walking tirelessly down on the waterfront of his Rimini in winter, breaking apart in the memory of Vanina as well as in the echo of that phrase firmed by Zurlini: “the hope never changed the time of tomorrow”. |