Twelve other books recommended by the Amici della Domenica to enter the semi-finalists’ roster. Among the titles in the competition, the novels by Pupi Avati, Pietro Castellitto, Viola Ardone
From literature to cinema. And return. If so many hits on the big screen have sprung from great books, why shouldn’t the opposite also happen? The director’s novels also enter the third tranche of candidates for the 2022 Strega Prize Pupi Avati and of the actor, son of art, Pietro Castellitto. They were in fact reported, respectively by Paolo Di Paolo and Teresa Ciabatti (finalist of the Strega in 2017 and 2021) High fantasy of Avati (Solferino) e The Hyperboreans of Castellitto (Bompiani). With them in the shortlist of possible competitors to the dozen semi-finalists, another 10 authors arrive. And we are at 36, with the most legitimate hope that they can exceed the 62 titles proposed last year (the nominations are made by the Amici della Domenica) for the same literary prize.
Avati takes us with his book to Italy in the fourteenth century, thirty years after Dante’s death (1321). The director and writer – who with this nomination also brings the Solferino editions to the circle of the Premio Strega – narrates in Nome della Rosa style the perilous journey of Giovanni Boccaccio, a passionate scholar of Dante’s work, executor of a singular task: to go to the Convent of the Poor Clares of Santo Stefano degli Ulivi in Ravenna – the same where the Supreme Poet died, and where his daughter Antonia now resides, who became a nun with the name of Sister Beatrice – to give her a cash compensation (10 florins, reminds you of another protagonist of Italian cinema?) due to the unfair exile suffered by his father. An unexpected and participatory meeting, through the centuries, between Pupi Avati (a passionate scholar of Divine Comedy) and two masters of Italian culture. His novel, we already know, will later become a film with Sergio Castellitto protagonist.
And here the destinies, between literature and cinema, of father and son meet (and mother, given that Margaret Mazzantini was awarded the Strega Prize in 2002). Why Pietro Castellittoactor and then director, with his The Hyperboreans he writes the story of a group of thirty-year-olds in Rome: children of professionals, heirs of economic assets, predestined, but also caged. I interrupted my acting career after two films because on social media I read “son of”, I was judged in a contemptuous way, he says. After returning to play the role of Francesco Totti in the Sky TV series I was hoping de died first, Castellitto who first became a director and then a writer, manages to stop – as Teresa Ciabatti herself wrote presenting it on 7 – in the pages the exact same moment in which youth ends. And his explanation is that as a young man, the fear of dying the fear of being incomplete.
It takes a step back in time and takes us instead to Sicily, in the Sixties, Viola Ardonne — candidate with Olive Money (Einaudi Stile libero), presented by Concita De Gregorio -, which delicately drags the reader into a world where female oppression leads to abuse: the protagonist Oliva rebels, opposes the violence of social roles. And she tells of a silent father, who lets her decide, one of the most touching male figures in recent Italian fiction. So still a story of families and families. Of misunderstood sexuality and stumbling family relationships also speaks Nothing true Of Veronica Raimo (Einaudi). He tells of a Puglia different from the white and clear one of the trulli and the masserie, a parched land, home to grim grandmothers and dirty uncles. And here too the cinema returns to mix with literature, because the producer Domenico Procacci nominated for the Strega Raimo, writer and screenwriter.
Another story of love and bonds the one narrated by Andrea Donaera in She who never touches the ground (NN Editore), presented by Daniele Mencarelli: the story of Andrea who, despite barely knowing her, fell madly in love with Miriam, in a coma after an accident, and sits next to her and talks to her every day. A biographical novel also enters the competition: Elsa Of Angela Bubba (Ponte alle Grazie), presented by Laura Pugno, tells the passionate and courageous life of Elsa Morante. She writes biographies for characters who have fallen into ruin who want to tell their existence in a different light, the protagonist of The borderOf Silvia Cossu (New editions), presented by Renato Minore. Elisabetta Favale, who previewed it on Linkiestaconfess that when I’m done reading The border I thought I had taken a tour in the eighth circle of Dante’s Inferno, because a book on the power of language that influences, on how communication acts on us by changing our perception of reality and in Cossu’s writing the degree of penetration in the psychology of his characters such as to transmit an emotional charge that cannot be curbed by the reader.
He uses the discovery of some letters and photos in an old family chest of drawers as a pretext Giovanna Giordano to weave the weft of The scent of freedom (Mondadori), presented to the Strega by Antonella Cilento: the story of Antonio Grillo, his grandfather’s brother; in his own way a naive and innocent hero who, at the age of twenty, in 1923, embarked on a long journey by ship, leaving Sicily for the United States. And this crossing becomes for him an important passage of awareness, to learn to protect himself from deceptions, to keep sweetness in bitterness, to find the strength to recharge himself from defeat, from misery, from abandonment.
Jana Karšaiovborn in Bratislava, 42, has lived in Italy for twenty years and on her literary debut with a novel, Velvet divorce (Feltrinelli) – presented by Gad Lerner -, which tells, in dry and effective Italian, of a separation, but also of an uprooting and a rebirth. And an unwanted separation also the one narrated by Claudio Piersanti in That damned Vronsky (Rizzoli), presented by Renata Colorni: the protagonist’s wife, Giulia, disappeared into thin air, leaving a note, Forgive me, I’m so tired. Don’t look for me. Giovanni, in search of answers, looks among Giulia’s books and from the shelves draws the most voluminous: Anna Karenina. She begins to read. And he is convinced that his wife has found another man. He is looking for a man, instead, the protagonist of A thin man Of Pierpaolo Vettori (Neri Pozza), presented by Paolo Mauri: a man who has never seen, whose life he tries to reconstruct. For years now imprisoned in a health institution in Venice, struck by a degenerative disease; he had been a famous writer but today devoid of memory. A novel about the courage needed to exorcise the fear of losing loved ones. Finally, a novelty, the graphic novel, completes the third dozen candidates for the Witch Happy days by Giulia Spagnulo, aka Zuzu (Coconino Press), presented by Valeria Parrella. Zuzu’s tables lead through the story of Claudia, fresh from a toxic relationship with the forty-year-old bassist of a Radiohead cover band: dialogues with pitch and reverse, long monologues, passages from stillness to neurasthenia graphically illustrate a well-orchestrated story. But will it be enough to convince the jurors of the Strega that the growth of the comic novel is worthy of a literary prize?
February 22, 2022 (change February 22, 2022 | 19:36)
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