BarcelonaIt would not be difficult for us to agree on the traps into which works of so-called social realism tend to fall, specifically novels committed to critical observation and narration of reality: the propaganda motive; Ideological Manichaeism and moral naivety. education; The superficial and single view of individuals and societies; Morale-laden extremism. The clear condemnation of a whole range of personal, political, social and economic injustices… Originally published in 1982, in the midst of Thatcherism and the process of deindustrialization in the UK, Al Ittihad Street, by Pat Barker (1943), was an important and successful English social realist novel of its time. Read more than forty years after its appearance, it arguably has none of the drawbacks associated with the subgenre.
Conceived as a frieze of intersecting lives, the novel is divided into seven chapters, each focusing on a character. These seven characters, the heroes of their chapters and secondary or extras in the others’ chapters, are very different from each other, but what they all have in common is that they are women and from the lower class. In other words, not only do they have to endure the misery of their painful socio-economic condition, but they also have to overcome the injustice of seeing how even the men around them, poor as they are, are as ruined by life as they are – or even more so – as privileged. More of them just because they are men.
Wonderful, awesome and moving
I know, so far this review sounds like a summary of a bombastic novel full of clichés. And more than it would seem when I say that pages Al Ittihad Street It is full of all the themes, all the tribulations and all the conflicts typical of images of a certain poor and degraded working class. I mean, in these pages, there are unwanted teenage pregnancies, selfish husbands drinking their family’s meager savings at the bar, a lot of resentment and a lot of helplessness, desperate, dirty abortions, absent husbands, neglectful fathers, and wives who are so abused. Their children, racial prejudice, low-level crimes, even the rape of an eleven-year-old girl… the list of incivilities is topically comprehensive.
Despite everything Al Ittihad Streetwhich was intuitively translated into Catalan by Albert Torrescasana,It is a very wonderful novel, terrible and poignant, and very clever when it comes to showing an over-known reality and presenting it literary in all its dramatic complexity.
There are two reasons that explain why Al Ittihad Street It serves as a literary artifact, beyond clichés and clichés. The first is that Parker constructs characters who find the delicate balance between representativeness and uniqueness, between generic classification and tangible humanity. The second reason is the complexity, between cruelty and sympathy, often bordering on contradiction and always full of nuance, with which the writer approaches the intimate, moral and psychological world of her characters. This, combined with powerful, transparent, precise prose, allows him to show and believably a mother who beats her young son while feeling ashamed and terrible for doing so, as well as a husband deeply corrupted by guilt – because he is unemployed and an alcoholic – who hates his wife and makes her brutally pay for it.
Pessimistic, cruel and mean, but also very human, Al Ittihad Street It is a portrait of a group of women (and men) who want to be better than they are, who want to do things better than they do, and who want to have a better life than they have. But for those who know this, neither in their lives nor in their world, nothing will ever improve.
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