The decommissioning with which the book deals is that of the Bagnoli steelworks in Naples.
Through the literary device of a technician, Vincenzo Buonocore, recounting his story directly to the writer, the history of the factory’s closure and its impact on the social fabric of this town in Campania is interwoven with a personal tale.

If I am to be completely in this book, and Rosaria must be in it, Marcella must be in it, Martinez must be in it, the disappearing factory must be in it, Bagnoli changing its face; if you yourself must also be in it, with your pretension of telling all this using me, and my mediocre human story must be in it, with all its weaknesses, grudges, and regrets, what sense would there be in keeping silent about what happened that evening between my wife and me?

The story is very simple.
Buonocore is a technician who entered the factory at a very young age as a laborer; over time, however, his skill, dedication to work, and above all his passion for the plant—for the continuous casting machine—led him to devote himself to maintenance.
When the decision is made to sell the plant to the Chinese, Buonocore is entrusted with managing relations with the Chinese technicians and overseeing the dismantling of the facility.
Meanwhile, Buonocore finds himself involved in a relationship—one that remains purely platonic—with the daughter of a colleague, Marcella: an adrift young woman yearning to lean on a more mature figure.
The two narrative threads, the relationship with Marcella and the shutdown of the plant, reach a grim conclusion with the girl's death and the definitive demolition, by dynamite, of the factory's remains, whose finest components, such as the casting plant, have been dismantled and sold off.
Moreover, his wife Rosaria's discovery of her husband's relationship with Marcella compromises Buonocore's marriage as well.

From the reading, an impression of contrivance emerges.
The relationship between Buonocore and Marcella is a succession of episodes whose premises and emotional implications remain obscure; its repercussions for Rosaria are likewise investigated only superficially.
At times, the depiction of the demolition takes on melodramatic overtones, traits of a social inquiry and political protest, yet fails to convince or truly convey the sense of what occurred.
The most compelling aspect is, in truth, the relationship between Buonocore and the industrial plant.
At the beginning of the novel, Buonocore enters the facility by night and climbs onto the casting floor to look down from above.

There it is, my plant, immense as a cathedral with a single grey-blue nave, its high ribbed vault and flanks arabesqued by geometric structural ironwork, traversed by bundles of pipes like venous networks, stairs, tracks, aerial walkways

The improvements he managed to introduce to the plant convince him that

the machine does not yield to any bullying, it rewards solely and exclusively your intelligence

.
Yet once the plant is demolished, Buonocore realizes that a bond of friendship has been severed.

And now here we are, facing one another.
There is only us: me, the crane, and this vast wreckage that I no longer recognize and that in turn no longer recognizes me; perhaps because it no longer possesses cognitive faculties, having lost its soul, its speech, its feeling

.
The most interesting aspect of the book is the grand theme of the relationship between man and machine, of a sort of infatuation that has characterized and continues to characterize technical culture, and which has steadily dissipated with the deindustrialization of the 1980s and 1990s.

Why not read it? Whatever perspective one might adopt in approaching the book (a personal story, the depiction of a society in transition, political denunciation, an analysis of technical culture), the treatment remains superficial, the style unappealing, and in certain respects prosaic and tedious.

The Dismantling