John Fante
La strada per Los Angeles

THE REVIEW

What enters the scene and into your life as a ditch digger is Arturo Gabriel Bandini. Give it twenty-three lines, and he'll become a dishwasher, give it a few pages, and he'll become the greatest writer that ever spat on this earth, but only after being a marathon runner and traveling with Terry to the four corners of the planet... or Mary? Any name. Arturo Gabriel Bandini, megalomaniac, egocentric, perpetually horny; irascible like a Chihuahua in heat; son and brother of two prostitute nuns blinded by Christianity, which he continues to support; son of a deceased carpenter; liar; hungry reader of Nietzsche and Spengler; eighteen-year-old bored and thoughtful who would erase everyone from this earth except Jim, the one with a nice head who always denies him tips, and Miss Hopkins... the one with the nice thighs who works at the library.

Turn around. What you see alone, in the last row and the far left of this empty cinema, is Arturo Gabriel Bandini. The people who sat next to him have moved. They’ve changed places, offended by the smell of dead mackerel that oozes from his skin. He works as a labeler in a fish factory for Shorty, a guy who also had a mother somewhere. Now it’s mackerel season, but in a few weeks, he'll smell like tuna. In a few months, he will have written the greatest masterpiece that this world has had the chance to offend. He will be rich, have girls in spades, and leave you all to your crappy lives. Your life, not his, which you will spend to gratify the greatest, the only Arturo Gabriel Bandini.

The Road to Los Angeles was written by twenty-seven-year-old John Fante in 1936 and remained inappropriate for this world until 1985, when Fante, blind and legless due to diabetes, had already been dead for two years and didn’t know what to do with the relative fame. It was Bukowski who insisted with the publishing house, to repay the man whose pen he had stolen. For fifty years, silence for John Fante, but the sense that not everything would end well was there from the start. After all, it didn't go badly for the son of an Abruzzese immigrant, born in Colorado and fleeing to southern California.

This story of daily monotony, of ironic daily desolation, rides the path of Arturo Gabriel Bandini - one of the greatest characters in American literature - alter-ego of John Fante - one of the greatest writers of American literature of the last century - and lies unresolved, fluttering among the winds of those who will know how to grasp it. All dutifully in the first person, a necessary means for writers of the prairie, and John Fante, even before being a writer, is prairie.