Maurice Bignami - Gli uomini eguali

Mussolini, Churchill, Hitler; German, British, Russian and American officers; revolutionaries, cops, robbers, schoolteachers and family mothers; Bologna, Paris, Africa, Russia; city and countryside, men and animals; political meetings, fights, love scenes, shootings and fancy-dress balls. And the Resistance: authentic, bold and cruel. All examined equally, around the main character, the author's father; hundreds of personalities take part in a story ranging from comedy to tragedy that begins in a suburb in 1921 and goes from there to world war and virtual revolution.
From the very first pages of the book, a Bologna of ruffians opens up before reader's eyes. We discover a run-down suburb and, around it, a medley of neighbourhoods all joined together, like a pickpocket and his drunken victim – but worse. There, a boy, called Ninni by his mother, spends every day in anger and resentment, a child’s version of contempt. But he grows quickly – he has no need to grow into Nino, move to Paris and submerge himself in the boredom of the Banlieue to discover wretched suburban desperation and the root of all evil. He is actually inquisitive, cheerful and full of spirit, which saves him from being just oppressed and turning into a vulgar disbeliever or an ordinary rabble-rouser. He was looking for a solution to misery that we all pursue, except a few, those who relax while others run until they're exhausted. He found a rock-solid answer when, in 1926 - that is to say, at the age of sixteen - he became a communist, though a very special communist: one with who liked to laugh and joke.
A novel as picaresque as any, "The Same Men" uses fury, irony and passion to describe the events of the nineteenth century: grand ideologies, armed utopias and the saving of nations. from the communist cell that quickly formed on Santa Croce street in Bologna, we roll like a marble in a game of table football, to Passage Gatbois, near the Gare de Lyon, and soon after enter prison, staying long enough to taste the bitterness and cruel laughter. We suffer brickbats, conspiracies, we banquet, make love, we even get married to evade taxes. We pursue Revolution and Reaction, the step-daughters of totalitarianism, in Italy, in France, in Austria and in Germany. We battle to the point where Spain meets African Magreb. Then we enlist in a war that suddenly becomes the confrontation of the era. We look out from a tank turret on the banks of the Mánica, of the Nile and a stone's throw from the Caspian Sea, because - as we now know - Germany lost the war by a hair's breadth. Then, after the euphoria of July 25th and the humiliation of September 8th, we learn plains fighting and resistance in the mountains. We become partisans to the bone.
Playing with genre - autobiography, history, fantasy - the author plunders his father's memoirs and, from the outset, speaks in two voices. The father narrates the wild adventures of his time while the son describes the difficult relationship with him, ponders the history of his generation, of the seventies and of armed conflict in Italy. This remarkable first novel is based on the true story of a man who has clearly had a truly adventurous life. Maurice Bignami follows the footprints of Nino's memory. In turn, Nino compiles and combines, with more success than a devoted ethnomusicologist, an entire generation's memories. This is a choral song that the author directs and conducts. Narrating a story, from "once upon a time" to "and they all lived happily ever after, some more, some less”, he uses six colours as if they were identification marks. From blue to deep blue, he sets off on the hard slog to a meeting-point with what might be humanity's better side; maybe to rediscover his father's love. "The Same Men" describes the turbulent actions of nearly four hundred characters - whether good or bad, bastards or kind wasters, idlers and people who it would be better never to have met - and, at the same time, it is a work of self-analysis, resolving once and for all the father-son relationship. And showing, like a politician does after electoral promises, his true face, unmasked and undisguised. But if the father, Torquato Niño, was Commissary Guido of the Modena Division, the son was Maurice. For both to achieve a glimmer of peace, they have to be followed to extreme political action, on the edge of Hell where horrors abound, finally arriving on the threshold of the present day. We have to be exiles in Czechoslovakia, after the Liberation, returning to Paris in the fifties and to Red Bologna of the sixties and seventies. This is how the "The Same Men" can make a contribution to peace between all those who fought, on one side or the other. And because, in Italy, there have been a multitude of sides, this last aspect leads us all to the moment of truth, to confront our history and wonder, "Where was I then?"

The book can be purchased at bookshops or via the publisher’s website: www.bietti.it