Book Review : Guglielmo D'Izzia - The Transaction (2020)
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When I was in high school, I wondered how someone could turn into their parents. I was surrounded with so much potential and ambition, it didn’t make sense to me how you could just decide to buy a house, have kids and be normal. Of course, post-college life and the job market took care of doing the explaining, but a sliver of mystery remained: how does someone becomes his job? How can your identity get atomized by professional duress? Guglielmo D’Izzia’s debut novel The Transaction took care of answering some of the lingering questions for me.
The Transaction tells the story of Mr. De Angelis, a man tasked with a simple mission: travel to a Sicilian town and close a real estate transaction for his boss. Seems like an afterthought, right? But everybody and everything is conspiring against De Angelis. The train is breaking down, locals seems disinterested in helping him and the circumstances of his travels get murkier by the day. A young, blue-eyed girl named Marinella seems to be at the heart of his issues, but it’s not clear how or why. But he’ll have to figure it out for his own sake.
The blurbs for The Transaction claim it resembles Kafka, that it is surreal and darkly humorous. All of it is true to some degree, but it’s not what interests me about this book. See, I think it’s a metaphor for professional anxiety. One thing that bugged me when I read it is that De Angelis never reveals himself. He’s an observer, like Nick Carraway in The Great Gatsby. But in truth, he’s only a vector for a business transaction no one seems interested in facilitating. His personality has been dissolved by the role he’s taken and the tasks he performs to survive.
That’s the difference between De Angelis and the other characters. He doesn’t exist outside the task he’s performed to ask. That’s why everything rebels against him. Even material things and climate. There’s this great scene where De Angelis wakes up nauseous and opens up the window for fresh air, but there’s no wind. It has to be the most brutal, heartless thing to happen to someone who wants to puke. When you don’t exist outside of what’s expected of you, it’s possible that even the climate won’t notice you exist. This is not a book to read if you’re overworked.
The Transaction is a smart book. One that knows exactly what it is and what it’s trying to say. Unless you’re undergoing an existential crisis, it’s a little difficult to identify to De Angelis, though. So it limits the potential of having an emotional experience with the novel. It’s a cerebral pleasure more than it is a visceral one, which is not going to be everybody’s cup of tea. I liked it because it explored the idea of the disappearance of the self, which I’m really interested in and it does it in a subtle way doesn’t call too much attention to itself.
It’s one of these books that’ll reveal to you what kind of reader you are.
7.3/10
