Alessandro Marenco
About:
Savona 1966. Worker, writer, former editor of pentàgora, with whom he had published five novels: Rosso Cadmio, Niente di nuovo a Montenotte, Come foglie, L’odore della torna bruciata, Il più dolce nome.
Borgo Case Nuove : Vite incrociate / Alessandro Marenco. – Minceto | Ge : Temposospeso, 2023. – 158 p. ; 19,5 cm. – (Temposospeso ; 4). – isbn 979-12-81467-03-3.
Why we propose to publish this book:
We believe that Alessandro Marenco is an author who can be appreciated beyond the borders of his native language for what he tells and how he tells it: a piece of the 20th century, a story that happened locally in Northern Italy but could also be found elsewhere. Lives linked to an era – that of the film camera – that is now displaced, out of time. Without rhetoric, sentimentality or useless nostalgia, but with a tone of dry humour, he tells us about the most diverse humanity, inserted in time, and its decay and transformation.
BORGO CASE NUOVE
A novel that tells the lives and stories of workers and families in the factory apartments until the 1980s. The factory, now closed, had really existed. Inspired by true stories.
Abstract:
A factory, the houses built around it, its workers, its employees, its managers, the people who choose to live in these houses; stories of families, neighbourhoods, cross-cutting stories told by many voices, stories that you read as you look out of the windows of an elevated highway and begin to imagine the lives of others. Borgo Case Nuove adds a new tile – always choral, intimate and popular – to the narrative mosaic that Alessandro Marenco has been dedicating for years to the life of a rural valley distorted by the rush of an industrial wind that, when it has passed, has left skeletons of empty warehouses and an uncertain social desert.
A look into the book:
‘Everything stopped in silence, for a very long time. About ten seconds. The torrents of masnadiers turned towards Pierina dazed in groups and one by one. The teachers and attendants stood at the door, dumbfounded. Even Nora pulled out the most astonished look she had, looking incredulously at her companion. ‘Sdrucciola?’ they all wondered, each one on their own. The teacher wondered where she had ever read it; the attendant, who had ever taught her; the classmates, how it was possible that Pierina was always ahead; the herd, as one man, what on earth ‘scrucciola’ meant, while, at the same time, the floodgates of unrestrained laughter and irrepressible school stupidity opened.’