The narrator gets sick leave but discovers that he has no idea how to deal with free time, how to relax or what to do in Turin. The factory not only degrades work; it degrades life away from work. This is alienation, the lived experience of exploitation, but it is demonstrated here without theoretical abstractions: it’s an oral account of a person’s days—that’s all.

Eventually, the narrator decides to dedicate himself totally to making trouble. It’s a commitment to risk everything. “I’m inside here just to make money and that’s it,” he tells his bosses at Fiat. “But if you piss me off and break my balls I’ll smash your heads in, all of you.” And so the struggle begins. But the narrator’s threat, that scene, is not a moment of singular heroism. As literature and history both, We Want Everything is not a story of one remarkable man (history never is, even if novels so often rely on the myth of an avenging angel). The voice in the book could also be said to represent all the nameless and unknown who went North, like Rocco and his brothers, and like the twenty thousand who were hired alongside the novel’s narrator in 1969. It’s the story of the people who worked these awful jobs, blessed and burdened as they were with a masculine pride, a rage and strength and violence that they decided, all at once, to direct at factory bosses.