Erskine Caldwell
Il Bastardo

It's a period during which I consume my eyes without any restraint. PC at work, sweat and chlorine right after coming home, other people's cigarette smoke in the evening, and pages before going to sleep. If I were my retina, I wouldn’t let myself be treated like this: I would threaten the owner by saying "hey, you bastard, keep it up and without warning I’m going on an indefinite strike".

Right after finishing reading Vian's "Foam of the Daze," I immediately felt the need to get my butt up towards the family library. The son of a dog I want to talk about today is so thin and slim that I had never noticed it all these years. And indeed, wedged between those two incredibly boring super classic bricks with a strong narcotic power, it seemed like a sad slice of cheese in a chemical McDonald's hamburger. The super-luxury cover and the first two pages pleased me so much that without preliminaries, we went to the bedroom. I told it: "we will make love tonight, and to hell with tomorrow morning's alarm clock". And so it was.

The protagonist is a bastard in both senses: the son of a whore he never knew and a person with an innate talent for not allowing grass to grow after his accommodating and affable passage.

Gene's story is objectively insignificant, meaning that there's no plot, surprise ending, goal, much less a moral. The events unraveled by Caldwell are stones thrown from a cliff, rolling everywhere. The author, in his debut, describes an animalistic life made of sexual violence, racism, stomach gunshots, and rotten love as if he were trying to explain the function of an internal combustion engine to a boy on his first day at the workshop. A coldness, an absolute detachment that strikes there; yes, right there in the middle with a dry and decisive manner that leaves no escape.

In this judgment perspective, the narrative style is not only important but assumes the characteristics of the mainstay. His is a direct and dry way of writing à la Steinbeck, overall linear, even though brief delirious introspective outbursts break the rhythm. The meticulous descriptions remain impressed. And indeed, we imagine the inviting firm thighs of that young whore; we hear those wooden boards creaking. The hot malt aroma tickles our nostrils, and we seem to feel it on us, even in the cold of this Siberian winter, the oppressive heat of a sawmill. That sticky sweat, that dusty desolate land is rendered so well that while reading, I even feel the need to go down the stairs for a sip of water from the fridge.

As I close the book satisfied, crumpling the pillow and turning off the light now in the dead of night, I think that an average writer of our days would have embroidered something like 150 mawkish and insignificant pages on the final episode, banalizing and ruining everything.

This is the first work of Caldwell I've read, and as a result, it should be very hard, almost utopian, for me to measure the value of this "The Bastard." But the fact that I now feel the urgent need to quickly wrap up this review to go look for "Tobacco Road" seems like a good way to recommend it to you and at the same time justify my five bastard, chipped, and filthy stars.