Rome, 16 June 2024 – «This will be a short story of my experience of life on the streets»: no, there are no typos in this incipit. Indeed, it is the opening of a novel written in a true and lively language – Italian learned on the street from a Pole. A credible language, the only one possible for a truth-novel that takes us with lightness, irony and an intensity that is never out of fashion into the world of those who live on the outskirts of the city, perhaps sleeping in the open or inside an occupied house, and in the meantime try to live like everyone else, with a partner, a job, a future. Story of my life (Sellerio) by Janek Gorczyca is a rare case of literature that is both working class and dropout, to use two English terms. Janek is homeless, but he is also a worker – a welder and a blacksmith – and in his book he recounts his “extreme” life with effective frescoes, the furthest thing from the bourgeois, petty bourgeois or at most bohemian tale of so much contemporary literature . It is an extreme life, that of Janek Gorczyca, but lived with ease, without complacency or even victimization, despite the violence, the abysses, the falls. His is a diary that becomes a space for reflection, criticism and self-criticism: the final pages on alcoholism, written with crude simplicity, are a small practical survival manual, the result of direct experience, with dramatic implications.
Janek, as it is told, is a determined and enterprising homeless man. He speaks Italian better than others, knows how to deal with the authorities and the police, distrusts “specialists” in helping the marginalized, makes friends easily, manages to always or almost always keep a job, despite a thousand vicissitudes, thus avoiding sinking into poverty and deprivation, as happens to many around him.
Life on the street, he writes, is “full of surprises” and therefore his autobiographical book is also a novel. Nothing idyllic about the precarious life he leads: arguments, evictions, violence, illnesses are a constant. The love story with his Marta, and the very close bond with his dogs, are full of suffering and tragedy. Alcohol is a subtle and immanent presence. Janek at least manages to keep the addiction (mostly) under control; Marta much less than him, and will pay the highest price. But Janek, with his outbursts of violence, even against himself, is also a victim of alcohol. A surprising book, a very difficult and nevertheless fascinating human story, which began in Solidarnosc Poland and is still evolving. Story of my life It deserves to have a sequel.
