We're Overthrowing the System, But First, Ten Push-Ups

The boy wants to rebel, and it would be nice to finally belong somewhere too. Among Italy's neo-fascists he is promised both, though it soon turns out that their first rule of rebellion is that he may speak only when spoken to. Andrea Oriente's debut novel follows the fifteen months it takes the boy to realize what he actually got in exchange for his obedience.

To get into the ScontroSistema's premises, you have to crawl under a half-lowered shutter, then switch off your phone and leave it on a shelf. Inside, plastic chairs stand in front of a lectern, and three men look down at the new boy from the wall. Mussolini is meant to be recognizable by sight alone, so only the other two have their names written beside them. One is Léon Degrelle, the Belgian Nazi collaborator; the other is Corneliu Zelea Codreanu, founder of what would become the Romanian Iron Guard. Just over two years after Codreanu's death, in January 1941, Iron Guard members killed more than a hundred Jews in the Bucharest pogrom.

Andrea Oriente takes the reader into this very room in his novel La nostra giovinezza (Our Youth), published in September. G4Media, reporting on the book based on La Repubblica, describes the author as twenty years old, though according to the publisher Oriente is 24. The twenty-year-old boy is the novel's protagonist. The book is autobiographically inspired, and through the boy's eyes we also see what makes such company attractive to someone who had never before felt that he really mattered to anyone. Here he immediately has a role: he's handed books, he gets to write articles, and on Tuesdays they even explain to him what's happening in Syria or Donbas. The final word, of course, always belongs to the boss.

On the enemies list, democracy, bureaucracy, immigrants and communists sit comfortably side by side, and so that every ill in the world has at least one name to blame, George Soros too. In everyday life, though, there's a more urgent task than overthrowing the system: the recruit has to answer properly on the material he's studied. If he stumbles, push-ups follow — for everyone. Whoever made the mistake counts them out. Claudio Paglieri, writing in Il Secolo XIX, points out how the push-ups keep multiplying throughout the novel, until it finally becomes completely clear what this shared suffering is for. The boys belong together, but the recruit also quickly learns what it feels like when everyone's arms are burning because of him.

For a while the boy even puts up with the slaps, because at least inside that room someone is waiting for him. Then it becomes harder and harder for him to explain why he keeps going back to the same room, where every question already has a ready-made answer, and where he even has to treat his own exhaustion as if it were a character flaw. He had wanted to get into politics; instead he ended up with a stick in his hand, and after fifteen months of comradeship he feels lonelier than he did before he joined. The system remains. The boy picks himself up and goes home.

Ugar