Valerio Evangelisti
One Big Union

It is as if the Nietzschean demon of eternal return seized history with its dark coils, ready to enclose in its circle all present, past, and future events, all human errors, pains, pleasures, and sighs, everything in the same terrifying sequence, everything as it has already happened, everything has been and everything as it will happen.

This is what Valerio Evangelisti paints, this is the timeline he traces without any mercy, in One Big Union. It is not only the story of the Industrial Workers of the World, the story of the progeny of a union that welcomed (and still welcomes, it still exists) within it everything that seeped out of the insurmountable walls of a growing society, the American one of the late 1800s early 1900s, which would delineate the path of extreme capitalism, aimed at stock market atrocities as much as those on the battlefield, and it is not just the story of Robert W. Coates, from a small Irish origin laborer to a political, religious, and family conservative to a degenerate fighting against degenerates. One Big Union is a story written on a transparent sheet which, carefully placed on our present, matches in a sinister and perfect manner.

Evangelisti tells of a past that never ends, tells of mistakes that never stop being made, where a good cause becomes difficult to implement because men cannot agree with each other without screaming in each other's faces, where those who try to stifle a certain progress prevail because with money you can buy, and sell, your very own father, where rights are confused with human, ideological, social regimentation, where lines mix in convoluted sets. Especially those between good and evil, and these are the ones that the Bolognese author loves to blur the most, with his "bad" characters, characters you should hate from the first page, and yet you find yourself pitying, if not loving, in a murky, dirty, violent sense.

From Nicolas Eymerich to Rogèrio de Campos to Pantera. And it is Pantera who passes the baton to Bob Coates, his opposite from every point of view, through a historical mirror in which both appear, and basically look each other in the face while it happens. The line that began distorted with "Black Flag" has taken different forms with "Anthracite" until plunging into this last book . Page after page, you will discover how a man can destroy his own existence simply by not realizing the changes around him, or rather, trying to destroy them, ignoring their importance, for fear of losing his true self, which doesn’t even waver under the blows inflicted by what he believes in and loves, a decidedly blind love, and a steadfastness that his opponents lack, a working class divided and splintered, just as happens today, a cohesion with his own thought that goes beyond human comprehension, until demolishing his own body, besides his life. A life that counts for nothing for this America that pours concrete on its roots and its future. And not only.