Scan barcode
elleneam's review
4.0
I really enjoyed this book - the absence of punctuation takes a wee bit of getting used to, but you soon find yourself swept away in the passion and fast-pace of riots, prisoner strikes, debates, work-ins, protests and political action. I like how it follows a group of young Italians with no theoretical knowledge of class struggle who are just giving it all they've got and struggling best they can. For me this book really highlighted how to be victorious we really need to be united in an organisation that can provide theoretical lessons of the past and solutions for the future, that can carry out meaningful mass actions, so that we are no longer groups of 5 individuals struggling separately, or one prison in the middle of the countryside burning sheets that no-one can see, but that together we are marching on the streets, dismantling the bourgeoisie state and building a new society which works in the interests of everyone, rather than a handful of billionaires and bankers.
_jpmh_'s review against another edition
4.0
A fascinating piece of work for the style as much as the content. Written entirely without punctuation, it flows like poetry, and somehow manages to change pace simply through the composition of the prose. Highly impressive.
jacob_wren's review
5.0
Nanni Balestrini writes:
but look I told him I don’t know why but I sounded annoyed but you know I really can’t stand any more I really mean it that we’re still stuck here with this bullshit still with this bullshit about winning or losing and it seems to me that it’s always really been our big misfortune that every time we’ve thought the thing that mattered was basically just winning or losing when instead the things we’ve really done have never had anything to do with winning or losing it’s clear that here we’ve already lost everything and not just in the last five minutes but the fact is that I think and a lot like me think so too that deep down we’ve never had not only have we never had any notion or desire to win but not even any notion that there was anything to be won anywhere and then you know if I really think about it now to me the word winning seems exactly like dying
And then there is this review from Pierce Penniless - http://piercepenniless.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/survival-on-nanni-balestrini/ :
The Unseen is written in unpunctuated paragraphs interspersed with different voices, differing levels of narrative intervention, reading at times as a stream-of-consciousness recollection, stitched together across jumps in time. This is not literary pretension, but technique serving its object: in other words, it is the literary form taken to best embody the narrative – sensitive to the individual’s relation to history and politics, rendering its questions always in terms of individual suffering, immediate relationships rather than political abstractions. Its technique is then in service of the ethical-political axis that drives its story, in the achievements and suffering of its nameless narrator; this shift of the ethical axis away from the ragged contemporary consensus on the ‘responsibility’ of Autonomia for the repression undertaken by the Italian state and instead toward the individual political subject (replete with intense political bonds of friendship, love and solidarity) is perhaps what most outraged its early critics.
but look I told him I don’t know why but I sounded annoyed but you know I really can’t stand any more I really mean it that we’re still stuck here with this bullshit still with this bullshit about winning or losing and it seems to me that it’s always really been our big misfortune that every time we’ve thought the thing that mattered was basically just winning or losing when instead the things we’ve really done have never had anything to do with winning or losing it’s clear that here we’ve already lost everything and not just in the last five minutes but the fact is that I think and a lot like me think so too that deep down we’ve never had not only have we never had any notion or desire to win but not even any notion that there was anything to be won anywhere and then you know if I really think about it now to me the word winning seems exactly like dying
And then there is this review from Pierce Penniless - http://piercepenniless.wordpress.com/2012/01/12/survival-on-nanni-balestrini/ :
The Unseen is written in unpunctuated paragraphs interspersed with different voices, differing levels of narrative intervention, reading at times as a stream-of-consciousness recollection, stitched together across jumps in time. This is not literary pretension, but technique serving its object: in other words, it is the literary form taken to best embody the narrative – sensitive to the individual’s relation to history and politics, rendering its questions always in terms of individual suffering, immediate relationships rather than political abstractions. Its technique is then in service of the ethical-political axis that drives its story, in the achievements and suffering of its nameless narrator; this shift of the ethical axis away from the ragged contemporary consensus on the ‘responsibility’ of Autonomia for the repression undertaken by the Italian state and instead toward the individual political subject (replete with intense political bonds of friendship, love and solidarity) is perhaps what most outraged its early critics.
subdue_provide75's review against another edition
challenging
dark
slow-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
2.0
Heads up: There's no punctuation! Which is cool for a while, but eventually makes this one of the more challenging books to get through that I've ever read. I think it took me a few weeks to get through, and it's just not a book worth spending that much life time on.
loppear's review against another edition
3.0
Gritty prose poem of creating autonomy and fear amid deadend factory life and uncertain prison life. Quite good as a visceral description of direct action, factionalism, and state repression in 70s Italy.
More...