From: Moira Bubola / Red.
Teach, literary critic, poet, with his first collection of stories Short patience to find you He won the Swiss literature prize in 2016: Giovanni Fontana Back in the bookstore with Blue spots, on a summer eveningpublished by the Roman publisher Castelvecchi.
The novel tells mysterious but sincere protagonists, starting from a woman who crosses the twentieth century looking for her identity: Elena He was born in Italy, on Lake Como, in a small bourgeois environment marked by fascism, he studies in Milan, gets married in Switzerland, experiences painful motherhood due to the psychic disease of the eldest son. Courage, hope, optimism These are the three words that Elena wrote about a sheet hanging in the kitchen, but the character is inevitably much more than this.
According to Giovanni Fontana «is a difficult character to describe and tell. It took me several years to try to bring his secrets, his hidden sides to light. Regarding that Bloc Notes leaflet, those three words, courage, hope, optimism … It is important because it is the moment when Elena discovers her destiny, her mission. Or maybe again, I would say, your condemnation. Elena is a girl who has been looking for herself since she was. He was born on Lake Como, and initially seeks herself by mirroring himself into the people around, especially his mother Costanza. Her strength, concreteness, I would almost also say heroism … but he feels deeply foreign to his deepest aspirations. Then his brother Sandro, his friend of the heart Lucia, and all the other inhabitants of this little lake world in which he grows.
The first important moment of his life is the discovery of the army, the discovery of feelings, feelings on which the small Filista society in which it was born and raised spreads a veil of silence and almost censorship. He discovers them in a delicate moment of his life, in which he is forced to stay for a short period in a nursing home in a location above Lake Como, Zelbio. In the particular atmosphere of this place isolated from the world, observing the lake for the first time from a different perspective, from above and not from the bottom, he warns something new, he feels the call of feelings … and he discovers them, through the music that for the first time he listens to the atrium of the sanatorium: Chopin. Then through the verses of Montale, who reads on a book that is lent to her from a neighbor’s neighbor, a student, also there to cure herself … discovers the feelings, and discovers that she will want to be different from her mother, who will want to study to discover herself. So university studies in Milan, at Cattolica: truly electrifying years for her, because they also coincide with the discovery of love, for a shy and intelligent university assistant. A love, we could say, disengaged, which floats on a thin film of words: read words, words listened to, written words.
The next step – the first crack, could say, in Elena’s dreams – takes place on the eve of the wedding. He discovers that he had to deal with something that had ignored: the body until then. It is the first shock, we could say, to which, immediately after the marriage, the transfer to Switzerland, the responsibilities and the weight of a life that thought of having left behind definitively choosing to study: a wedding life, and then as a mother who must dedicate herself entirely to her children are added. When the unexpected event happens, the psychic disease of the eldest son Luca, is of course a disruptive event that questioned all the previous balances. But it is also, paradoxically, the event that offers her the possibility of filling a sort of inner void. And therefore the scene in which she writes those three words – courage, hope, optimism – is essentially the acceptance of a mission which, however, is also a condemnation ».
Elena is certainly a tragic, mysterious woman character. And she tells her through the voices of those who met and frequented her. A choice, that of polyphony, difficult to manage for a writer. Why did you opt for this form?
Here it touches an important point in my idea of narration, and narration long. In my transition from the short story to the novel, I imagined a polyphonic narrative. Perhaps to understand the meaning of this choice we must start from the initial situation, which is described in the first pages of the novel: Elena is now over the years, widow, is compared with the worrying results of some clinical tests that induce her to rethink life, to retrace the plot of her existence, in a reconstruction that however has something forced. It is that particular condition in which the elderly are found to try to return all the accounts of one’s life, and to find meaning even where this sense has not been there. Here, this type of reconstruction deeply touches Pietro, the second son, the son in this moment closest to Elena: it touches him, but also indignation, because the image he has of this family story is completely different.
According to him, it is a story marked by pain, by incomprehension. And even that central event, the psychic disease of the eldest son, should be written and told in a different way. From this tension the need for Peter is born to contrast the mother’s narration an alternative narrative. And while he sight out of the dusty diaries, letters, photographs, here, as if from nowhere, the voices of witnesses who have known Elena, and who are ready to tell it, and also tell a part of their lives. This mechanism, this polyphonic intertwining of voices, is not an exercise of experimentalism in itself in itself, but responds to two very specific needs, at least for me. On the one hand describing the tiring research of a sense that each of us performs within themselves, naturally undermined by the holes of memory and traps; on the other, give the reader the sense ofenigma by Elena.
Elena is truly an impregnable character: a normal woman, but also a woman who lives in the shadows and who also knows how to release a charm that you cannot remain insensitive from the shade. There are many voices around Elena, the prospects multiply, but this does not thin out the fog surrounding Elena, but on the contrary, we could say this little great mystery, which perhaps we are all. So the meaning of this polyphonic narration is the search for a truth which, however, proves, ultimately, always elusive.
There is also room for the story of the inner monologue of the various voices that give us back the figure of Elena, an inner monologue that she makes in brackets, in italics. This choice reflects a waste between the agitation and the thought, which becomes a fracture that is difficult to remediable?
It is so. I wanted to create different writing levels and therefore also of reading. I wanted the character to appear to us in his actions, in his words, but also in his thoughts, and that there was a kind of short circuit between this dimensions. Hence the use of different registers, also to different graphic solutions simultaneously. I wanted to create a particular rhythm in the story, a broken pace.
The reader will notice, opening my book, that the white spaces between one paragraph and another are very frequent. This wants to give the meaning of an almost anxious narrative, of an anguish that somehow accompanies the writer and who reads. Therefore, yes, the use of these registers, to the Corsive who are joined by the rounds, the brackets that somehow affect the page further in -depth spaces … it is absolutely intentional, and linked precisely to this idea of fragmented writing, of a whisk, almost syncopated, which has been close to me since I started writing, and which in some way already existed in the nuance in the previous stories.
We come to the character of Luca, the eldest son, suffering from this deep, important psychic disease, who distorts Elena but also the whole family life. I seemed to feel almost a modesty in making Luca take voice, that he also told Elena …
I believe you are right … let’s say that, for most of the novel, Luca is told by the others, it is somehow described through the filter of consciences of other characters, his illness in particular. I wanted a sort of waiting to be created also in the reader, because there is a space for Luca, who is the final part of the book, the epilogue in which he takes the floor directly and tells himself, his relationship with his mother, the relationships with his younger brother. We could say that both, both the mother and the brother, somehow they use Luca’s disease, a word that I pronounce with some pain. We said that Elena finds in this disease and in the care of Luca a reason for life, but also Peter, in a certain sense, draws from the closeness with Luca the impression of living something great, of being touched by something great as psychic disease can be. I know I’m saying a blasphemy, psychic disease is pain in the first place, but in itself also something great … and Peter, in some way, feels this greatness. Of course Luca warns in this attitude of his brother, a forcing, even violence.
Luca’s disease is told for most of the book through the consciences of the other characters. In particular, there is a scene, a disruptive event that marks the beginning of the most sensational phase of this disease, which is told many times from different points of view. As if by telling her many times and somehow consuming the words, it could be canceled, the fourteen -year -old son who existed the day before the exploding of the disease could be found intact. So, there is like a preparation for Luca’s entry on stage, which takes place only in the final part.
Luca also expresses a desire for normality, would like to be invisible, he would like to no longer be at the center of the scene, he would like to be normal. But he also perceives this fate of solitude on himself. I tried in the final pages to make this sense of solitude feel, abandon itself. Even by intertwining the story of a scene the evocation of some lines of Rilke who have always touched me a lot, and who speak of solitude, of abandonment.
