Rachel Kushner

[rich]

fine essay

http://www.theparisreview.org/art-photography/6197/the-flamethrowers-rachel-kushner

he young woman in war paint was from an archival document of 1970s Italy,
and she symbolized for me the insurrectionary foment that overtook the
country in that decade. “Autonomia” was the term for this foment, the
movement of the 1970s, a loose wave of people, all over Italy, who came
together for various reason at various times to engage in illegality and
play, and to find a way to act, to build forms of togetherness in a country
whose working class was impotent and whose sub-working class was fed up
with work, by turns joyous and full of rage, ready to revolt, which they
did. There were various layers, of which the most violent, shadowy, and
clandestine (and yet, paradoxically, the most visible and sensational) were
the Red Brigades. The Italian seventies had seemed a logical subject for
fiction, on account of the fact that I kept stumbling upon its lore. It all
began when I met a mys- terious and magnetic Italian woman who didn’t say
much, and who, when I naively asked her what she did, what she was
interested in, stared at me and said, “Niente.” She had been the girlfriend
of a Red Brigades terrorist, I learned. Her “niente” did not mean
“nothing.” It meant, I don’t engage in what you’d call work. Or interests.
I might add that I met this woman in a house on Lake Como that was filled
with someone’s mother’s Fascist memorabilia, busts of Mussolini,
D’Annunzian slogans chiseled into marble.
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