Fabio Pasquale's "Il Lavoro della Polvere"

It is rare that the debut novel by a little-known author is so sharp in content and lucid in form. “The work of the dust”, by Fabio Pasquale, is a very well written noir that keeps you nailed from the first to the last page.

The story is simple in its abnormality. A man kills a double to play dead and escape with the firm’s money. To do this, he will have to assume his identity for a few months, so as not to arouse suspicion. This is possible in a world where you have little attention for others, where you don’t look each other in the eye, where you don’t know each other but become interchangeable. On his path there will be obstacles that he will eliminate without scruples or remorse.

One can think that the tragedy lies in the killing of an unfortunate person, whose only fault is to resemble his killer. In reality, the death of the poor man named Manuel is aseptic, surgical: a well-aimed blow is enough and everything ends without emotion or excessive participation. What chills you is the very existence of Manuel, a modern travet so colorless that even the store clerks identify him as a loser.

“Manuel is a dull color, one to associate with boredom and discard almost immediately.”

By profession, Manuel is a pony pizza delivery boy, delivering meals at home with his rickety scooter. Assuming his identity, the protagonist explores his squalid existence which is, in part, also his own. If Manuel lives with shyness and with resigned melancholy, his murderer rebels, he ruthlessly analyzes what he sees, highlighting only the negative aspects: desolation, misery, degradation, boredom, in a Sartrean spiral of nihilism and nausea.

Manuel lives in a bad apartment, with a neighbor he doesn’t even notice. To lure him and learn more about his life, the murderer invents a virtual identity, creates a facebook profile in the name of Ambra, posing as a former elementary schoolmate who has become cool and fascinating over the years. It goes without saying that, dragged into the vortex of the chat, Manuel falls in love with Amber, dreams of her every night and spends his days counting the hours waiting to go home and connect.

More than the murder of an innocent, the representation of a world in which we are no longer able to live and create a physical bond with people is freezing. “The work of the dust” is a drama of the social era, it shows us to ourselves, with our bare and emotionless existences, it paints us while, bent over the keyboard, we evoke friendships and loves that are the fruit only of our imagination, loaded with our expectations, destined to crash against the wall of reality. By doing so, lost in a virtual planet where others seem seductive and we are better, we end up despising what we have at hand, never looking out the window, no longer feeling the warmth of a hand or the husky shades of a real voice, condensing every emotion into a hasty emoticon. We end up not even realizing that the other, our employee, our neighbor, our delivery boy, is not the person we have always known but a double of him.

After the murder, the killer meets by chance Paola, Manuel’s neighbor, whom the delivery boy had never considered, and with her he establishes a rewarding relationship. The relationship between the murderer and Paola symbolizes what it could have been if the victim had had more courage, more eyes to look, more strength to live his life to the full. The killer is Manuel’s alter ego, and, coincidentally, he doesn’t have a name or a precise identity, but he embodies the victim’s possibility to enjoy his own existence. Through his murderer, we discover that, perhaps, Manuel was not the loser he thought he was, this was just an image with which he identified himself to such an extent as to force others to see him that way. And even his double sees through Paola the eventuality of an authentic emotional involvement, capable of sweeping away boredom and dullness, but, following his own logic, he knows that “on one-way streets, moving forward is the only possible option “.

We leave the ending to the reader.