Under-Soldier

The book's title is taken from the rank that the author had at age seven when his playmates - all older than him - were kings, presidents and generals, and found that the rank of soldier was still too high for him. Rather than a reason for humiliation and consequent insecurity, this demotion has trained the author since childhood not to put on airs and not to believe himself important, even when with advancing of age and career he might perhaps have thought so. The cut of the book is therefore to look at things from the bottom upwards, and to remember, without emphasis and often tongue in cheek, a life that in many ways was exciting, sometimes useful, always lived as a service and never as an opportunity for personal gain.
In a sense, "Under-soldier" is a non-book: it breaks the rule of going from the general to the specific, from the atmosphere of the time to private history, and leads the story in reverse, from private history to History. It's like listening to a conversation that does not concern you from the room next door, like listening to the phone call of someone else, or reading private papers. But only to find out that you are interested in those sentences that you have overheard, in those pages of others, because they concern a world and a chain of events, places and people, facts and Facts. It is a "story" that is not an essay, not a novel, where every idea (and the theory derived from the idea) comes from something that happened, where events crisscross each other and the imagination is a reflection of things that happened, words that were spoken, not invention.


The cover of the book has been created by the Publisher from a drawing by the author.