The emergence of the current of disenchantment and formal disinhibition as a literary current also had its European reflection beyond the American echoes of Bukowski and company (in fact, considering that this reference emigrated to the United States from Germany, the trend can be understood back and forth).
The question is that Alan Sillitoe, practically a contemporary of Bukowski, also played a narrative impregnated with dirty and decadent realism. If some distinctions have to be made between both exponents, I would dare to point out that in Sillitoe this "dirty" tendency was alleviated in a kind of hopeful echo, only without a very clear horizon. Less alcohol, less sex and less drugs but the same feeling of emptiness and rebellion.
In England, where Alan was from and where he carried out his literary career, he was included in the current of the "angry young men", a label that, as is often the case on many occasions, remained more for posterity as an unwanted nickname than as another thing.
The point is that in the end Alan emerged as one of those alternative chroniclers who outlined the miseries of the 20th century from the personal perspective, extended thanks to the famous label to something generational.
Top 3 best novels by Alan Sillitoe
The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner
Alienation is probably a fate carved out for all those who are born in the wrong neighborhood at the most inopportune time.
That's what Alan Sillitoe talks to us about. And yet this narrative proposal exudes that feeling of wanting, of trying to achieve something different from what destiny had in store for so many young people from Alan's young days, back in the 50s and 60s. Here we meet Colin Smith, a young man gifted for running and that in a certain way could inspire every current runner who seeks a form of escape in the simple sport of putting on shoes and going out.
Only Colin's case is radical. Their memories are a sum of frustrations and conflicting feelings of youthful energy and walls raised by the mere fact of belonging to less favored groups.
Together with Colin we discovered many other young people who complement this scenario of defeat at the same moment in which they became adults in suburbs where life was something else...
Saturday night and Sunday morning
For lovers of labels, this novel is the one that represents the knock with which Sillitoe's generation presented itself at the doors of reality with anger, frustrations, guilt and perdition, all that sum of attitudes filled as only response to emptiness.
And yet also in this novel there is a motivation and an excuse, as well as an attempt to atone for sins and to recompose. Arthur Seaton lives for the debauchery of Saturday night, where no morality or rule can put borders on it.
Without actually looking for the easy morality, the reading does reveal a transforming intention, a hangover awakening to the harsh consequences of finding only in rebellion a false happiness of the ephemeral.
English workers' literature, with that touch of gray walls and skies, all inheritors of the industrial revolution and of alienation extended generation after generation.
Life without armor
Memories and their biographies should always be considered as one's own novel. More if possible if the one who subscribes it is a writer. And that's what Sillitoe did in this book. The hardships of the boy from Nottingham, his time in the army as the only way to become a man under the blackmail of the country of the day.
The survival of the adult and his dedication to narrating the reality of so many and so many like him, neighborhood boys who continued to be that, boys without childhood forced to be abused adults for life.
As I say an autobiography in the elementary of the facts but also a hurtful literary composition about those losers even before they have played.
