This interview was published on the novel. "If in your life are many, usually the houses that you lived, who live, and living, I realized that among these the one hand there is the house of being, on the other house of being. The latter is better not to coincide with your own home. It's quite a feeling. "Could be summed up in these few lines the essence profonda del nuovo romanzo di Roberto Ferrucci. La casa dello stare è, per lui, Venezia, quella dell’essere, Saint-Nazaire.
Ospite del MEET (Maison des Écrivains Étrangers et des Traducteurs), Ferrucci ha la possibilità di riflettere su se stesso e sul proprio paese, senza l’invadenza della quotidianità. Il tempo trascorso lontano dall’Italia, protetto dal calore del suo rifugio di scrittura, si dilata, prendendo forma in ricordi e rabbia. Sentendosi sempre altro, fuori posto, fuori tempo, afono in una nazione di urlatori e commedianti. Annaspando nel protrarsi di giorni sbagliati, inabissato da scelte altrui. Camminando per i viali della memoria, trovando sempre – purtroppo – something wrong, one that struggles to keep nausea under control. Ferrucci expresses no half measures, his disgust with contemporary Italian society, for his leadership and his own countrymen.
He and Teresa, a beloved companion, are different. They suffer, trying to scream their discomfort, but then can do nothing against the prevailing indifference, and end up close in the embrace of comforting their love, to escape from their own anger. Ferrucci talking about politics is a river in flood, harsh, exuberant, sharp and destructive. No doubts. There were times, reading it, when I'm upset, I myself am feeling the "subversive sentiments." No, not everything sucks, we're all stoned and stupid, we're not a lousy people, not all. I wanted to tell him, crying with her eyes, whispered in his ear. But the passion, politics as a loving, does not use half-measures. All or nothing. Either we believe or not believe. And he believes in what he writes, and this dampens my anger.
Then, turn the page, it turns out the writer's race, the precise, crisp, enveloping. Saint-Nazaire, the apartment on the tenth floor of the Building, the sunny terrace overlooking the ocean, you enter in your eyes, you see them clearly, smell the sea, the sound of the harbor, took a deep breath and find yourself next to him sitting su una sedia da cucina, a guardare l’immensità del mondo da una finestra sconosciuta. Le navi da crociera in costruzione, i paquebot, sono bianche. Il palazzo dei frigoriferi è bianco. Le case sono basse e bianche. Il cielo, oltre l’orizzonte, sopra la testa, è bianco. Le pareti sono bianche. Tutto il bianco percepito (che dà il titolo al primo capitolo) è il cuore di questa storia, che storia non è. Non c’è finzione, struttura narrativa compiacente, né fantasia. È la vita, quella vera, quella che uno scrittore non sa soffocare, cui deve dare voce. Teresa e Venezia. Roberto e Saint-Nazaire. E viceversa. Torna l’irruenza, la forza, la devastazione. L’amore è tutto, per Ferrucci. È passione, tenerezza, dipendenza e lontananza. Nostalgia e desiderio. È Teresa che stempera il suo disgusto, è lei che gli stringe la mano e lo fa sentire completo. È lei la persona da portare nella casa dell’essere, la sola con cui condividerla. A cui regalare, sul finale, le parole più belle.
Roberto, come nasce la tua collaborazione con la MEET e il suo direttore Patrick Deville?
La Meetè una Fondazione letteraria che invita scrittori di tutto il mondo in residenza a Saint-Nazaire. La residenza consiste in un soggiorno di un mese e mezzo e in una borsa settimanale. Non viene richiesto nulla agli autori, né testi, né conferenze, né incontri nelle scuole. Poi però arrivi lì, in questo appartamento nel quale sai che sono passati decine e decine di scrittori e poeti, vedi i libri bilingue sullo scaffale del soggiorno, libri curatissimi, di autori prestigiosi, come il Premio Nobel del 2000, il cinese Gao Xingijan, e sai che, eventualmente, c’è anche questa possibilità, che un tuo testo venga scelto per la collana “les bilingues”. L’unico editore in Europa, Meet, a pubblicare letteratura contemporanea in volumi bilingue. Ed è noto che la traduzione sia, per ogni editore, un costo faticosamente sostenibile. Mi piaceva quest’idea di un romanzo pubblicato soltanto altrove, quasi inesistente in Italia. Una sorta di fuga della creative part of my brain, intellectual expatriation from a country where culture is now only an unnecessary obstacle to a road of emptiness, of arrogance and superficiality.
Feelings subversive was written between Venice and Saint-Nazaire. The royal house and the one being. Did you ever overlap, or reverse them, then return to split?
can not say. Maybe it happened, but without my noticing. Moreover, it is the narrator of the novel to make that distinction. I also agree with him, but I also believe that then, finally, when you write, the Your only home is the writing. When I write I'm in there. That is why I find it - and I like it - write out of the house, in cafes, on buses, ferries. When I write, I'm just inside the page, even if the discussion on the houses that makes the protagonist in the novel's opening, well, 'yes, I agree.
Teresa is a female figure in thickness, to which you cling to escape the disgust he throws you in this our Italy. Love, today, is a subversive sense?
Yes, but only in our country (even in tiny writing that novel, because today Italy is a country to be small, grudging, vulgar). Today in Italy is subversive everything is normal. It is subversive to require a school to work, the study is a right. It is subversive claim to be informed seriously, that television is also a means of deepening and not just a showcase of nothing. It is subversive, today, in Italy, to claim the culture as an essential value. It is subversive to the President of the Republic stresses the unity of Italy and the obligation and right to recognize in the Constitution that, according to those who know, is the best in the world. It is subversive to write a novel that highlights all of this is ultimately a love song for a country, my, that seems to have been lost altogether.
This type of reading, on a scale of one to one, a book, always puts me in a quandary. Especially because it is a read-only here. From us. My three novels Terra Rossa (Transeuropa, 1993), What Change (Marsilio, 2007), Feelings subversive (Meet, 2010), have a narrator who is perhaps still the same. Maybe. A narrator who looks a lot like me, it's true, but that does not necessarily mean the same as me - maybe - and I know that others see and, in turn, might know. I like to think of fiction as a form fully open and inside which there is room for everyone. In my idea of \u200b\u200bnarrative there is no difference between self-fiction and crime, for example. Still struggling to understand why here in Italy all, readers, critics, publishers and even writers (not all thankfully), practice a radical break and vertical. I, after a long time '(not many actually) of books published and a life devoted solely to writing, yet fail to understand what the distinction between what is fiction and what is not. And frankly, I did not even care to understand. My foreign publishers have never put this kind of problem. For them, the narrative is fiction. Point. The story is the story. Maybe it depends on the absence of a narrative tradition in our country. But it is a complicated speech. It is no accident, however, that here the triumphs genre fiction, especially the yellow, or fantasy. We need clear structures are recognizable. We need, in short, in this If, as readers of uniforms. But I do not know if I answered. I can only say that for now this is what I said. For books that are coming, we'll see. I think it is clear, however, that as far as I'm concerned, this issue does not exist. You are about to see that my next novel will be a yellow? In fact I'm reading and rereading Simenon ...
Barbara Greggio
