Everything changes when his father falls in love with another woman and decides to go and live with her, abandoning his wife and children. Philip’s world crumbles, his few certainties falter. Almost overnight, his wonderful life as a serene and confident child turns into the hell of an adolescence without points of reference. The inability of adults to manage an important but ultimately within their reach crisis marks the deep furrow beyond which the loss of innocence is fatal. His brother Keith is now soon a boat adrift in the throes of the seas. Philip tries to lend him a hand but the apathy he opposes is like a wall; dialogue is impossible if you speak two different languages. The mother is weak, incapable of taking over the reins of a life out of control. Ultimately, her father is a mean figure, a slave to instincts, selfish. The squalid attempt to re-establish even a minimal relationship with him has even grotesque consequences. Philip doesn’t really know what to do with that life that remains with him. The siren song is ever louder, ever more persuasive. He knows he has to go, he knows he will go. He just has to find the moment and the opportunity. The sixties are about to end, war is the horizon. Philip realizes that his mermaid is wearing a military uniform…
The thief in the barracks it is a small jewel born from the pen of the American writer Tobias Wolff, considered by many to be one of the last exponents of American realism with a legacy that goes from Hemingway to Raymond Carver. Without a doubt, he shares with these two sacred monsters his very sparse and a-personal narrative style, where the author resembles a reporter who limits himself to recording events rather than telling them, abstaining from any digression or, worse, ethical judgement. Insights that Wolff leaves entirely to the reader, showing the actions of the characters and letting these speak for him. The text consists of just over one hundred pages, and has a clear structure essentially divided into three narrative moments. The first focuses on Philip’s family situation in the aftermath of his father’s decision to leave his wife and children to get together with another woman; the second is a long – surreal – moment of barracks life in which Philip, together with two other comrades, finds himself having to carry out orders which soon reveal themselves to be senseless and which echo the military obtuseness of Giovanni Drogo lost in his Desert of the Tartars; the third and last is the story that gives the story its title, focused on some mysterious thefts that occur in the dormitories. Distinct narrative cores but at the same time well linked by the common thread of Philip’s inner growth, in whose soul these events will leave an indelible mark. A very pleasant book, which flows fluidly from start to finish not only for its brevity but also for Wolff’s extraordinary ability to hook the reader from the first lines, never letting him go until the epilogue.
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