John Fante, or free and uninhibited literature

“Arturo Bandini was certain that he would not go to hell when he died. As for the Ten Commandments, he had broken them all.”

Summer 2026, a time for re-reading. An opportunity to revisit the entire Arturo Bandini series by John Fante, that splendid American from Abruzzo who, through a world-famous alter ego – thanks to Charles Bukowski, who rescued him from the depths of oblivion – gave shape to a saga in four parts: "Wait for Spring, Bandini"; "The Road to Los Angeles"; "Ask the Dust"; and "Dreams of Bunker Hill".

Reread the whole thing and see, laid out before you as if on a platter, everything that is missing from most contemporary fiction. And what we, as readers, are becoming less accustomed to expecting. Spoiler: real life instead of a political rally, please. And now let’s start all over again.

Who is Arturo Bandini? A legend. The aspirant within each of us. The aspirant that he himself is: a young Italian-American from Colorado shaped by a deeply traditional Italian family. “A leader,” as Sandro Veronesi described him in an introduction—inevitably full of exclamation marks—to the Einaudi edition of "The Road to Los Angeles". Inevitably: why? Because Arturo Bandini is alive! And he is someone who asserts things with great vigour. He is also someone who denies things with equal vigour. He has been certain, ever since he was fourteen, that he will not end up in the eternal flames, yet he does not seem to meet the requirements – at least, so he confesses in "Wait for Spring, Bandini". Arturo, after all, is someone who never meets the criteria. But he declaims and proclaims. For example, that he is a great writer. Yet he has written only one short story, entitled "The Little Dog Laughed", in which, in his own words, we know that it is not about a dog and nobody laughs. Arturo is an expert on women’s behinds (here, yes, he does meet the criteria: see Dreams of Bunker Hill). And he’s the sort of man who, throughout an entire novel, chases after a novel he wants to write and a woman who’s completely out of reach – Camilla Lopez from "Ask the Dust".

Arturo Bandini first appears on the scene aged fourteen in the first novel about him and leaves it behind in his twenties in the last. He is always in the midst of learning, of struggling with life. His essence, essentially, is precisely this: Arturo Bandini is life, full stop. He is not a reflection on life. He is not a character in the form of a question. Bandini is what it means to be alive, pure and simple, and he is so very much so that he often risks being overwhelmed – yet in the end, no, he does not give in; he stands his ground, chest out; he fails and tries again, because he is someone who both surrenders to and resists life, someone who loves and hates, pursues and waits. And he does so constantly, throughout this so-called tetralogy that sees him in action. And we call it ‘false’ because, more than anything else, it is a publishing arrangement. It wasn’t even written in chronological order: forty-five years passed between the first volume ("The Road to Los Angeles", written in 1936, rejected and published fifty years later when Fante had been dead for a couple of years) and the last ("Dreams of Bunker Hill", dictated to his wife in 1981, by which time Fante was blind and had had both legs amputated due to diabetes). "Aspetta primavera, Bandini" – which tells the story of fifteen-year-old Arturo, still showing little hubris but already at great odds with the world – was published in 1938. "Chiedi alla polvere", the novel about the impossible love of a twenty-year-old Arturo, followed the next year. The first three pages are phenomenal: Arturo has to leave a squalid motel room in California; he falls asleep there, then wakes up and wanders about. Fante’s mastery unfolds in all its purity right from the start: Bandini gets up, does some push-ups, goes out for a coffee, heads to his usual restaurant, smokes two cigarettes, reads the billboards displaying the American League results, thinks of Joe DiMaggio, stands in the middle of the road and bats a ball past an imaginary pitcher, scores a run, sets off down Olive Street and takes us on a tour of it all, thinking back to two friends from Detroit who used to live there, to a pair of women’s legs, to the man in the lift, to an evening at the Philharmonic, then daydreams in front of the Biltmore Hotel and is spellbound by a shop window full of pipes, smoking them all, imagining himself to be a great writer.

Narrative freedom and no amateur psychology. Just observing life without ever judging it. And characters – that is, creatures full of life and contradictions – not arms armed with concepts to be proven. Long live John Fante and his uninhibited, free and vibrant literature: our own, fortunately, not just that of the writer.