The “natural” inclination of literature to be a search for a suffered truth

I know where places, names, objects come from but but The characters of my book are largely unknown: I suspect that their soul is made of an impalpable matter such as the effort to achieve the truth. Therefore, The characters of a novel are animated by a Spinozian “conatus”the primordial force that pushes everything to continue existing. Therefore, acting according to one’s nature. Consequently, The author has a relative control of it: he perceives their effort to live. However, which is then his to approach the truth.

One of the stories I love most is On the street Of Vassilj Grossman And I wonder if it is not also because the protagonist is the animal that for Antonomasia evokes the idea of ​​effort, fatigue and “natural” inclination literature search suffered innocence: a donkey. Through the eyes down. For example, transported following the Italian army by Ethiopia to Russia, we see the Second World War: a few pages saturated with truth with an ending that tells us in a simple image the human destruction against nature, creation, animals, soul and therefore also man himself. However, It seems to me that literature. Meanwhile, in its higher leaders like these and many other pages of Grossman (his Life and destinyfor example) consists in giving life to characters who live according to truth – a necessary truth and as such frees – making themselves mirror of the universal.

Since the investigation of Verona, writing is a metaphor for effort, fatigue and somehow also of innocence (the riddle is proper to the playful world of childhood): recalls the effort of those who “natural” inclination literature search suffered work a hard field to be dispered.

The title of my book. The wind plows the skyrecalls this ancient effortsuggesting that it is not only man who tries it but nature. Geological time enters the narrative.

The white cliff of the Turkish scale – "natural" inclination literature search suffered

Il poetic languagewhich I used for the title but also for the short “introductions” to the various chapters of the book, He helped me to return the sense of a point of view that would ambush with that of the “Natura Naturans” which, in some way, always remains in the book in the book. The image that summarizes it is The white cliff of the Turkish scale – a place of the Agrigento area where I spent the summers up to my ten years. now stormed by international tourism – whose training dates back to the Messinian: through some characters who, for “natural” inclination literature search suffered better or for worse, bind their little ones, infects to the great cliff, the immensely great coexist with the immensely small. Their “conatus” appears so fragile seen from a sidereal distancebut those who indulge in nature. its wisdom, according to its nature, have margins of maneuver and salvation.

In certain country shorts of Pirandello come Padron gave e Sing the epistlesomething similar happens: those who take on the point of view of nature. an apparently naive but profound look, and are therefore put on the margins – people who socially applies nothing as Giudè and Tommasino Unzio – has the ability to grasp the temporality (the provisional and therefore the absurdity) of that rewarding of interest and values ​​that holds the community thus managing to unmask, to disseminate, disarming.

It may also be interested in

Sicilian writers are familiar with the “natural” inclination of literature to be a search for a suffered truth – "natural" inclination literature search suffered

Sicilian writers – In addition to Pirandello, above all Leonardo Sciascia – they have a familiarity with the “natural” inclination of literature to be a search for a suffered truthtiring, because Sicily is land that, in a single movement, enhances those profane interests that was said to be said and denies the truth. The mafia is the expression of this dynamic that we find today everywhere in the epiphanies of contemporary capitalism. In my novel there is not as a sensationalistic element (as often finds it declined in the cinema for example), but as a substantial factor, intrinsic to the company, the premise of today and certainly not only of Sicily: rereading it, it returns to “natural” inclination literature search suffered me Giovanni Falcone’s phrase on the “mafia as a human phenomenon which as such, has a principle, its evolution and will have an end”.

“History, in the Sicilian historical novel, is the ground in which the discourse on the truth is articulated”

Based on that desecrating effort that is literature, it seems to me that this phrase – whose author is another source of inspiration – assumes a particular meaning (at least I hope). History. in the Sicilian historical novel, is the ground in which the discourse on the truth is articulatedthe unspoken and the imposture, reaching until it is denied (bollated precisely as a imposture Il Council of Egypt of Sciascia). In my novel. which, dealing with facts dating back to almost seventy years ago, falls into the aforementioned category, History is a segment that is incorporated in the long axis of geological timeand yet, by “natural” inclination literature search suffered force of this, it seems to me to buy all its meaning, for better or for worse, of stories – to the plural – of women and men, creatures lost in an immense space that can also be that of their small, private, pain.

The author – Dario Lanfranca He was born in 1970 in Palermo, where he today teaches Italian and Geusteria at the Provincial Center for Adult Education Nelson Mandela. Director and screenwriter, in 2017 he signed the short film The other child and in 2025 Judgment.

Now. after the publication “natural” inclination literature search suffered of The golden sponge (Rubettino, 2019), essay on the origins of the mafia, signs his debut novel, The wind plows the sky Outgoing for minimum fax on July 4th.

Dario Lanfranca

A book that moves Between the streets of Agrigento and Palermo, between the 1960s and seventies. The protagonist is Sabrina. “naive silent girl”, whose history and that of her family intertwine with the events that really happened. The genesis of the “mafia bourgeoisie” emerges on the scenario of Sicily, which “like a odorless gas permeates anything”.

In the footsteps of Leonardo SciasciaLanfranca focuses on the effects “natural” inclination literature search suffered of that “gas that does not save anyone”