No, I want an old-fashioned funeral, I've even written it in my will, a civil funeral, but one that is deeply moving. I don't want priests; I want former priests, those who have permanently cast off their vestments and become communists, even though they remain priests in spirit. I want four such defrocked and clerical priests, and I also want two black horses with manes on their heads, two literary critics in the place of the coachman, and for the four wheels of the carriage, I want, in this order, a historian, a critic of art, a publishing house executive, and a columnist for the third page.

An autobiographical novel, Bitter Life takes place in Milan during the "economic miracle". The protagonist of the story moves there to seek revenge for the deaths of dozens of workers in the mines of his hometown. From his small provincial town, he suddenly finds himself in the Milan of progress and industrialization, in the Milan of cabarets and futurist painters. Like quicksand that swallows anyone who approaches it, so it devours him, making him forget his primary goal, more or less. To survive, he initially works at a cultural magazine until he turns to freelancing and earns a living translating English-speaking authors. The anxiety that torments him daily is singular: will he manage to translate twenty pages daily, so that he can provide for himself, his partner in Milan, as well as his wife and child back in his hometown?

A few words about the author: Luciano Bianciardi was born in Grosseto, Tuscany, on December 14, 1922, and died in Milan on November 14, 1971, at just 49 years old. He was a journalist, writer, and translator. He was the first to translate Henry Miller, William Faulkner, and Jack Kerouac into Italian. Among others, he has written the novels: The Miners of Maremma (I minatori della Maremma, 1956), The Integration (L’integrazione, 1960), and Bitter Life (La vita agra, 1962). This year, the year in which a novel by Luciano Bianciardi is published for the first time in Greek, marks the 100th anniversary of his birth.