Friday 10 May at 6.00 pm, on the occasion of the Night of Books and Libraries, at Mondadori Bookstore – Ciofalo bookshop of via Consolato del mare 35 in Messina, the second novel by Giusi Arimathea, “A piecework life” (Pungitopo publishing house, 2024).
He will dialogue with the author Eliade Maria Grasso. The readings will be by Mauro Failla.
Followed by a literary aperitif by reservation.
“A piecework life” is the first-person story of Vincenzo Sottile, a pieceworker from the South who, with the clear intention of preserving his memory, tries to recompose a web of family history and reclaim it.
In the background, the great story that comes from the small screen, from newsstands in those years without the internet in which the world was not yet running. They are representative episodes of an era filtered through the eyes of the protagonist: curious, permeable, lucid.
What the narrator does, through rapid evocations of a past that exposes, orients, absolves, is a journey into the feelings, into the bonds that have outlined his existential path. The emotional suspense that the individual carries inside, between drama and poetry, love and emptiness, hope and pain, fears and the most unsuspected variations of living.
“Piece work – declares Giusi Arimatea – it is the metaphor, romantic if we want, of a world devoted to production, usefulness, dehumanization. A world that too often renounces life in the mad and illogical attempt to make it productive. I liked the idea of tracing the seeds of this new regime which is the profit society, highlighting where possible its senselessness, and doing so by closing the lens on a single existence, emblematic even if negligible.
I firmly believe in the heroism of ordinary people, those who silently face obstacles every day, those who resist, those who hope. Much of that poetry that literature has the privilege of being able to retain lives there.”
The novel is inspired by the theater show of the same name produced by the Clan degli Attori in 2023 with Mauro Failla and directed by Giovanni Maria Currò.
Giusi Arimathea (Messina, 1974) is a journalist, writer and playwright.
At the service of every exploration and work in the artistic-cultural field, he mainly deals with theatrical, cinematographic, literary criticism, curation of art exhibitions, dramaturgy and direction.
He has written texts for the theatre, subjects, screenplays, dialogues for short films and films, historical essays and the novel Di donne, di Diritti (Pungitopo, 2022), third place in the EtnaBook National Literary Award 2023.
Winner for two consecutive years, in 2021 and 2022, of the “Aldo Nicolaj” National Dramaturgy Award, and in 2023 of the Navarro International Award.
