Franco Lalli’s New York—Diario di un Reporter is a literary journalistic diary: dated, scene-by-scene reportage from 1930s New York, written in Italian with aphoristic, satirical commentary. The narrator, an Italian reporter, records vignettes rather than a continuous plot, moving through restaurants, trams and subways, churches, Wall Street, cinemas, hotels, banks, dance halls, and city squares.
Recurring themes are modern mass life, speed, consumerism, money as a quasi-religion, and the city as theatrical spectacle. A Rockefeller Center engineer, Reinhard, provocatively claims America’s “secret strength” is that Americans “don’t know how to eat,” so they avoid the lethargy of long meals and keep producing. The diary contrasts wealth and poverty: a man in a tram survives the Depression by sending his wife away, placing a child in charity, killing the cat, and living on city relief; the fall of financier William Durant becomes a moral parable. Lalli visits figures such as columnist Arthur Brisbane (who defines a newspaper as the second hand of history), Italian-American promoters and artisans, and observes street politics in “red” Union Square.
Moments of quiet (a signed Mass for the deaf) alternate with nightlife, prostitution, advertising schemes, and constant numerical “facts,” ending in an ambivalent portrait of a city both ingenious and rootless.
