My Moments. What it means to be born in the balance between two eras for Edoardo Albinati

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The only other time I saw Edoardo Albinati in person was in 2016 at an instructive Roman presentation of La scuola cattolica, the novel that would consecrate him with the Strega Prize. I remember regretting not having brought a notebook with me and, due to some strange memory lapse, that Albinati was wearing adventurous white trousers. We were in the Auditorium and there was an unusual air of expectation for a book considered a literary event. The many interventions from the audience packed with writers would have confirmed this: an admiring eulogy from Veronica Raimo, a polemical one from Christian Raimo (and who else), I think Elena Stancanelli also said something, perhaps even Pacifico. It seems like the beginning of a joke and, in fact, at least one funny anecdote came out. Over time, in fact, it has taken on the contours of an almost legendary character . On stage with Albinati, there was Francesco Piccolo. Before focusing on the separation of the male, Piccolo began by saying that when he was in charge of the book section of the magazine Amica he would pass off to Albinati, who taught at Rebibbia, all the scraps and junk that he didn't want to review. Until one day Albinati called him to say: "But these people are already in prison, why should they read rubbish that you don't even like?".

Almost ten years have passed, but the charm of the man who an esteemed colleague of his described to me as “the best Italian writer” has remained intact. Black turtleneck, measured and parsimonious gestures, he welcomes me into an airy living room, where in addition to a piano, books and a work table there is another table, but an architect's . “It's my daughter's, even though for a long time now the projects have been done on the computer. Luckily I've found an amateur who will come and take it away…”. We are in the fateful Trieste neighborhood already the scene of the events of La scuola cattolica and the occasion is the release of I figli dell'istante (Rizzoli), Albinati's latest book, the third in the “Amore e ragione” cycle that he has been composing in recent years. This one, however, as he himself is keen to underline, can be read independently of the other two. It is a pulpy choral novel, almost Russian, full of characters who live their Warholian quarter of an hour of glory , so crowded that a map is needed at the back of the book to keep track of all their connections. We are at the dawn of the 80s, or rather no, they have not yet begun: "The characters in this book no longer belong to the previous decade and not yet to the one that will follow, they are in fact 'children of the moment', balanced between two eras". Among all these children of the pen, Nico and Nanni will often return in this conversation: "Two concave characters, they serve as a link with those around them. Nanni lives in a sort of gynaeceum, surrounded by the feminine. Nico instead goes chasing it here and there" Albinati tells me. "For me it was important to escape from the masculine after having internalized, analyzed and unmasked it so much, while in this book I feel the voice of the female characters more mine" .

We sit on a sofa and, like a good schoolboy, I begin with the geography – orography, hydrography, climate – of a novel without toponyms. Is this lack of references a ploy to alienate the reader as is done in dystopias? “Estrangement serves to tell all over again what is obvious to us. I didn’t want to give indications of the places because I preferred to get there by descriptive means, without naming them, as if they were being spotted for the first time, but the reader will be able to guess where they are: the city on the water crowded with tourists or a volcanic island, the moral capital or the nearby lake with the villas of the rich. If I describe a towering cathedral bristling with pinnacles, well, it has a completely different effect than calling it by its usual name . Especially since the girl who climbs onto this absurd artifact is seeing it for the first time in her life!” An initial elegy is dedicated to the Boot, but in the book it is also a childhood relic kept by Nanni, a model made of steep ridges, asperities, humps and valleys, which at a certain point will be lost irreparably. Is this what happened to the country you describe? “No, that country is still there, we have it outside the window. The Boot is one of the protagonists of the book, the place where these characters swarm and disperse. And since this landscape is so varied, I wanted to take advantage of it. Beaches and mountains, lakes and islands. Many of these sets were chosen because I thought they had the same importance as the stories that took place there. It is impossible to cover the entire country, but there are many of its 'offerings' that still today exude charm and attract foreigners in a morbid way, despite the torment and devastation of the coasts, the tourist delirium of the cities . In the initial elegy I made my own the gaze of the Italians on themselves, but also of the foreigners who came to do the Grand Tour in the beautiful country”.

If the places don't have a name, you've gone wild with the characters. I'll list a few: Nico Quell, Guido Cetrangolo, Lodovico Ragghianti, Gerolamo Majno, Enobarbo, Rita Valtorta, etc. It's like reading the credits of old movies. "I've updated and modified the list of Nico's comrades called out during the counter-roll down to the last draft. I'm fascinated by onomastics, names that sound and speak to us. The formidable list of Actaeon's dogs in Ovid's Metamorphoses, for example. Choosing names is one of the few fun things when you write. I collect them, and I also have a notebook of book titles that will never exist." So, do the characters' names come first? “The character is an emanation of the name that baptizes him . Name and physiognomy are already his destiny, perhaps it is also so in life, certainly it is so in novels. The face and body of the other tell us everything right away. That body, those eyes, the name, there, they are already presence, parousia, to use a philosophical term”.

But let's get back to the places, there are two, those frequented by the young Nico Quell, which are described at length as a bit like life gyms: the Minaudo publishing house, "a school of style and a gallery of exemplary characters in their own way, a quick course to learn how things work and how people relate to each other", and the barracks, which instead is a school of power, which teaches repetition and oppression. Could it be this life spent in education that makes all places be read as learning opportunities? “Look, although it may seem the opposite, I have little vocation for teaching. I do not pretend to convince anyone or to be anyone's teacher or to transmit anything. In I figli dell'istante all the characters pass abruptly from ignorance to awareness, they learn something but without any guarantee of being able to use their discoveries. Many of my stories are tests or initiations, rites of passage, the moment of truth. Let's think of Berio, the intellectual on the point of death, who according to logic should access some ultimate truth through pain, and yet the meaning of life perhaps remains that of Monty Python : fundamentally existence is absurd and despite the experiences accumulated the enigma remains such ”. Is no one saved? “Perhaps the only person in the entire book who truly grows up is a ten-year-old girl, Maria. Awareness will not prevent her suffering; on the contrary, it may make it worse. The adults remain more immature than she is. And yet, if the characters were all already mature, the novel would not exist. Every novel is a coming-of-age novel. We retain a certain immaturity until the end. Shakespeare says: Ripeness is all. But precisely because it is all, we cannot capture it entirely .”

To stay on the subject of learning, again without naming them, you wrote that Milan is a pedagogical city, while Rome teaches nothing. “But in Rome there would be too many teachings, the problem is that you don’t learn much from them. Instead, in Milan, people mostly go there to work, and work remains the primary school of life. The concentric and hierarchical structure of the city, ordered by class and affiliation, is much clearer than in a city like Rome where the layers mix and merge. Rome is the city of spectacular disorder, perhaps this is why it has fascinated directors . There is a coexistence of eras and the risk is to think that everything that could happen has already happened and therefore nothing more will happen. Which leads to this form of skepticism that extinguishes all enthusiasm and leads straight to disbelief, to a fundamental nihilism. However, it has an advantage: here the hierarchies, which elsewhere are respected and even adored, collapse under the blows of disenchantment. And it turns out that the prophets are almost all false prophets. Flaiano docet ”.

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Snowstorms in which little girls get lost in the mountains with an improvised companion, Nanni who falls asleep on the beach after a bad encounter with a weever fish and never finds his daughter, a thwarted suicide attempt. We prepare for the worst but then the tension dissolves, the tragedies in your book are almost always just touched upon. “Now I may seem megalomaniac, but it’s a bit like Shakespeare’s last works, The Tempest and Measure for Measure, where the final dramatic solution is avoided. As Tomasi di Lampedusa brilliantly said, it’s as if at that point Shakespeare were to say to humans: go and get blessed. It’s useless for me to punish the bad guy, for Macbeth to die, because they don’t understand this lesson that humans should receive, that is, we don’t understand it . Life will continue with its ups and downs. It’s useless to apply a moral to the novel. In my stories, you can only enjoy the incompleteness. Also because completeness would mean the end, death. Almost all of them remain open, even the erotic relationships are unfinished. There is no fullness in this book except in the instant. Reading it instant by instant, then perhaps you can find it, in the suspensions and not in the duration. Peter Handke said that even in a blizzard, if we isolate the detail of a snowflake that resting on a branch, in that delicate fragment we can find splendor, quiet, wonder. Even if the general picture will remain threatening and chaotic. Since the full meaning is not reachable, at least let us enjoy the interstices and cracks. Perhaps this is the non-moral of the book .

Tragedies only touched upon. “I may seem megalomaniac, but it’s like Shakespeare’s last works, where the final dramatic solution is avoided”

But could it be that you wrote all these characters and moments because otherwise you would have been bored following only a handful of them? “When I read, I get bored when after twenty pages I can clone events and writing and understand where the author is going. It's like in television debates where you see who the guests are and you already know what they'll say from the first to the last word. The bias, in short. So I try to get bored and bore a little less by discovering in my characters some unexpected things that maybe they didn't even know about themselves. The novel is this revelation: you go into battle and we'll see if you'll be brave or cowardly, you can't know before, until you face 'the red sign of courage'. In my novel even the villain isn't completely so, maybe in one episode you'll discover that he has a gentle, adorable side . In some literary genres, for example satire or comedy, fixed types are fine, like the miser or the braggart, in the novel they aren't. For example, the sentimental side is always unpredictable, which is why the bookworm I call the Kobold, instead that finding a Cobolda falls in love with the beautiful and unattainable Sheila. And incredibly she reciprocates. That's how it is, I like to bring contrasts and contradictions into the field. Otherwise you know what a drag life is”.

In the novel, Nanni argues that understanding something means consuming it and in the end nothing remains. Misunderstanding is fascinating and sets desire in motion. Do you feel misunderstood deep down? Unclassifiable? Is this why you change skin with every book? “ The answer is clear: yes. Misunderstood even by those who understand me. I know that I cause confusion even in the most intimate people . I don’t know myself completely either. This ignorance, even if it creates discomfort in those who experience it, however, provokes a desire to investigate, to delve deeper. Even within a couple, a certain level of misunderstanding of the other allows a mutual search to continue”. But do you also enjoy confusing critics a little? “But no, it’s not a game, or maybe it is but without malice. Only in my first book, Arabesques of Moral Life, did I put an epigraph signed EA and everyone thought: wow, what arrogance this guy has, quoting himself in an epigraph! And instead it was Edward Albee, a near-namesake. In hindsight, I feel a certain tenderness towards my hypothetical readers, poor things, every time they don’t know what to expect. But that’s fine with me . There are authors who create loyalty, but I start from scratch every time. Now how do I write? I have to understand not only what I’m going to write it, but how. Not being a real novelist, much less a serial novelist, I have to try a new path. To put it, again, with Monthy Python: ‘… and now, something completely different!’. I understand that it can cause dismay: the very long book, then the short one, the prose, the poetry…”.

“In hindsight, I feel a certain tenderness towards my hypothetical readers, every time they don't know what to expect. But that's fine with me”

Speaking of making yourself understood: Berio, another of your characters, this intellectual who should finally write a book after a life spent hiding, has his daughter read a letter by Plato as if it were a coded message. But isn't the novel the best way to hide a confession or smuggle in a reflection on oneself or others? " The novel derives from confession. The first time that what happens in the human heart is told is in the Confessions of Saint Augustine . The novel is the secular version of confession and, as in the sacrament, we confess what we would not tell anyone else, the unspeakable, precisely. And we do it behind a grille. Inside we can put what we would never dare say to a real person. When people ask me if I think about readers when I write, the answer is no. Because if I thought about it I would be embarrassed, like when I have to tell intimate things that I am ashamed of.

“The novel is the secular version of confession and, as in the sacrament, we confess what we would not tell anyone else. Shielded by a grate”

While if I speak to no one, that is, I write, there I can be cheeky and available to the story, without hesitation”. And what is still left to say after all these books? “Here I say it and here I do not deny it, maybe this is my last book. I fear I have given almost everything I had to write or invent. But if there were other stories in the future, perhaps I would follow just one of the characters who escaped from this novel, who could still have a voice”. Let’s hope this escape succeeds, then. Before leaving, however, I ask him a question that has been buzzing around in my head for a while. But how come almost all Roman writers are Lazio fans? Is it because of that story of the minority literature of Deleuze and Guattari? “I found an explanation in a fan who said: you became a Roma fan because in your class everyone was a Roma fan, I became a Lazio fan because in my class everyone was a Roma fan. To stand out, then? I don’t know. A couple of years ago I gave a Lazio Magistralis on the subject”. Another lesson, and then he says there is nothing to learn. This time, however, I had brought my notebook with me.

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