Il Dante Working class di Alberto Prunetti

Nel girone dei bestemmiatori. Una commedia operaia, 2020

Abstract

In the latest novel by Alberto Prunetti’s Working-Class Trilogy, Nel girone dei
bestemmiatori. Una commedia operaia (Laterza 2020), the “working-class” experience of the author’s father, Renato, is integrated in a process of parodic rewriting that involves Dante Alighieri’s Inferno and the “Hell” of the Italian proletarian condition in the second half of the 20th century. This article will firstly  underline the analogies and divergences between Prunetti’s novel and Dante’s
archetype, while, in a second step, the similarities between Prunetti’s narrative and Dante’s poetry will be highlighted according to what has already been  consolidated in the first two volumes of the trilogy (stylistic contrasts, linguistic expressionism, abundance of regionalisms and Tuscanisms – multilingualism – elevated metaphorism). The aborted journey into the afterlife (the denial of
paradise and the spectacular “comeback”) will be read in the conclusion as a narrative choice dictated by the particular Prunetti’s Sehnsucht: the nostalgia for a future with ideas already collectively experienced.