Andrea Gianinazzi

L'uomo che vive sui treni

«The railway track seemed dead as dead can be: two iron rails laid on a roadbed now invaded by weeds. A few shrubs had also managed to take root between the sleepers and were beginning to thrive.»

Here are eight stories – told as if eight fragments of a single story: the story of a vagrant, who lives on trains and whose own path crosses the paths of many other people. Only the first and the last story are about him: the tale of a deportation train that finishes up on a disused railway line because the war has ended; and the one about his own tragic end on a train he boards quite by chance and on which he becomes aware of the sense of his own existence.
Between these two extremes are the stories of other people: the permanent way inspector, who every week walks through a long tunnel, looking for damage to the track; the retired old man who spends his mornings at the railway station and watches people as they arrive and depart; the woman who goes back to her husband to hammer out the details of their divorce; the train conductor, who is about to retire and on his last shift takes a nostalgic trip on a goods train through the Alps; the student of Logic, who is simply going home from University for the vacation and gets mixed up in an incident involving drugs at the border; and lastly the truck driver who, one night, in the middle of a storm, loses both his vehicle and a colleague.
These ‹Stories of the Rails› will envelop readers in a pleasant nostalgia for railways and rail travel – whilst at the same time deeply affecting them through the distressing situations they describe. The rattling and creaking of a bygone technology captures sketches of everyday life and casts an intense light on the life and times of the 20th century.

Recommended for translation by the Swiss Arts Council Pro Helvetia:
www.12swissbooks.ch

Translation of title: The Man Who Lives on Trains

Armando Dadò editore, Locarno 2012

ISBN: 978-88-8281-294-2