Works
His first volume of poems, Il ramarro, was published in 1948; he won the Viareggio Prize in 1960 for Le porte dell'Appennino and the Mondello Prize in 1986 for Con testo a fronte.
His novels explore the ills of Italian society in the years of industrial expansion after the Second World War, while powerfully constructing a visionary fictional world.[2] His first novel, Memoriale (1962), describes the atmosphere of growing violence in a factory environment and in society as seen through the eyes of a working man, leading to his alienation and gradual descent into madness.[6]
La macchina mondiale won the Strega Prize in 1965. Its tragic main character, a peasant-philosopher living in the Marche region, has been described as "surely one of the most bewilderingly pathetic figures in contemporary Italian fiction".[7]
In Corporale (1974), an ex-communist intellectual becomes obsessed by the threat of nuclear war and builds himself a shelter in the hope of emerging, once it is all over, closer to the animal world.
Il sipario ducale (1975), with which he won the Viareggio Prize in 1975 for the second time, marked a return to a more traditional form with a story told against the background of a bomb attack in Piazza Fontana, Milan in 1969.
Il pianeta irritabile (1978) is an allegorical story set in 2293 where four characters – a baboon, an elephant, a goose and a dwarf – escape a final explosion and wander off looking for a safe kingdom, encountering traps and terrifying obstacles, in a perpetual guerrilla activity whose scenes take place under diluvian rains that threaten to engulf the whole planet. There is no real end in sight, and this is the most disturbing aspect of the whole novel. "Everything is pointless. Volponi is the Samuel Beckett of science fiction in this work."[8][9]
Il lanciatore di giavellotto (1981) contains a portrait of a troubled adolescent boy, Dami, which is, according to James Kirkup, "the most memorable of all such portraits since JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye, written 30 years before".[8]
Le mosche del capitale (1989) charts the rise and fall of an industrialist poet.
With La strada per Roma (1991), Volponi became the first of only two Italian writers to win the Strega Prize twice.
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