Earlier this month, the literary gods that decide these things sent me a message from the great beyond and said it was high time I finally read, front cover to back cover, Pietro di Donato’s 1939 novel Christ in Concrete.  (What, you think we only read Irish stuff around here?) This raw New York story is about an Italian immigrant laborer working under such unsafe conditions that he is literally drowned in concrete, following a building collapse.

If this sounds a bit heavy on the symbolism and, thus, a tad unrealistic, that’s understandable.  But it’s actually happened to di Donato’s own father, who (like the victim in the story) was an immigrant named Geremio.  It’s also what happened exactly 60 years later, in Brooklyn, to a 21-year-old Mexican immigrant named Eduardo Gutierrez.