The Mondadori volume dedicated to the author is out on November 23rd. Literature, theater, life: all the voices of an intellectual who continues to find the novel in the present
«I was born traveling», writes Dacia Maraini in the collection of writings The seduction of elsewhere. And if it is true, as Peter Handke says, that “Writing is a very special way of walking”, then the word that could best crystallize the writer’s life is “path”. Relentless, tireless, graceful, never nervous, perhaps unpredictable, certainly not yet sated.
Dacia Maraini has walked through the decades as a bridge that unites the last century and the present time. Not one cesura, but uni: his writing has linked distant things to each other (for example militancy and kindness), he has sewn the transience of the Time.news to robustness of reflection, it has been the glue in some historical friendships, even in certain loves.
And the Meridiano that Mondadori sends to print on Tuesday 23 – edited by Paolo Di Paolo and Eugenio Murrali – is not so much like a goal as it is a refreshing stop, where to stop, reread, rediscover. With the certainty that the path will go on, because Maraini has never been able to “settle down” in a style or in a genre, much less in a comfortable ideological refuge.
Seen in this way, collected, his work amazes: the rigor takes on a magmatic consistency and for this very reason hot, in the making. Since early works such as The holiday (1962), Maraini has never stopped living in time, in his is in the our weather. Perhaps because she was the daughter of a great anthropologist who let herself be conquered by the world, perhaps because she was a traveler since childhood, little girl wandering between East and West, perhaps because her shyness has always anchored her to intelligent listening: she has certainly never detached herself from a story of the present in the making.
This explains the variety of registers and genres that the Meridiano highlights: from the novel to the short story, from the journalistic article to the dramaturgical writing, Dacia Maraini was and is one of the most important narrators of our life. And even when it launches into explorations of the past, like it The long life of Marianna Ucrìa, in the mouth the sensation of something very close remains: Marianna is all women forced to love against their will, for example. Dove is all the women who simply disappear, physically or only metaphorically.
One wonders if this inclination to sublimate the news in literature is a disposition, a vocation or a destiny. In a certain sense it is she herself who answers, always ne The seduction of elsewhere: «For me, knowledge of the countries passes first of all through books. I wouldn’t know anything about Petersburg if I hadn’t read Gogol and Dostoevsky. I wouldn’t know anything about Moscow if I hadn’t read about Lenin and Stalin and about a beautiful dream of redemption that has ended up torn and wounded ». Thus we grasp the knot of his path, which is anomalous: track reality into fiction, thus assigning, in fact, primacy to literature.
This is also evident in the articles that Dacia Maraini periodically writes for the “Corriere della Sera”: hers is never a conformism in such a way that the incident (the launch of the agency, to understand) is followed by the authorial reflection, with a homily of ordinance. It is the writer’s gaze that never stops finding the novel in the present. A changeable novel, because it can be a woman victim of violence, a frozen beggar, the loneliness of an elderly person.
It can be said that Maraini has found a complete language that is halfway between reality and literary construction, a code that allows her to tackle countless themes. Abortion, for example, experienced in the first person (a spontaneous abortion) with a pain that under trace has returned several times in his books. Violence against women seen from multiple angles – “The relationship of victim-perpetrator complicity remains shocking,” she said. The commitment in defense of nature and animals, support for the elderly.
And also when has faced more inaccessible territories, such as war, Maraini has never stopped using his hybrid voice that descends from the heights of the brain and touches deeper and more accessible chords to everyone. “Many think that war is a fatality, something inevitable and eternal, a destiny to which sooner or later we must succumb. Why not believe that, just as slavery has been abolished, war can also be stopped and replaced by bargaining, international diplomacy and a system of police controls? ” (from I dreamed of a station, 2005).
Of course the theater, always present in his life, he played an important role in the construction of his physical, corporal, tactile dimension. The novel Isolina, among those included in the Meridian, has a structure that precisely recalls dramaturgical writing: «A door opens. Two feet shod in chamois advance with a faint sound of crushed leaves. Two beautiful legs closed in an ocher-colored shirt advance in the darkness of the hall covered with cobwebs ».
The theater for her was also the cornerstone of the feminist commitment. Commitment expressed in a very personal way: intelligent, cultured, ironic. Maria Stuarda, Clytemnestra, Charlotte Corday, Saint Catherine of Siena are just some of the characters that Maraini has given body to and not just words. And it is important to remember here that the writer led popular theater experiences, such as that of Centocelle, at the end of the 1960s.
But that is not all. The continuous alternation of life, theater and writing (and perhaps also the beautiful smile that starts from the eyes) has made Dacia Maraini a singular figure of “family intellectual”. She is the one who goes into a battle to defend an uninhabited village. She is the one who intervenes to remind everyone that everyone has the right to a little company. She is the one who becomes passionate about the story of an anonymous village girl and maybe turns it into a novel. It is the one that rewards young authors, who writes letters full of encouragement to young literary critics, who organizes cultural evenings in the Abruzzo village that he has chosen as the home of the soul.
Insomma, parachute Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “We should all be Maraini.” And, yes, she certainly would agree with the original title too: We should all be feminists.
The carreer
Meridiano Mondadori (pp. 1.856, euro 80) dedicated to Dacia Maraini is released on Tuesday 23rd. The collection traces the salient stages of his career, including novels and short stories, with some texts never included in a volume. Il Meridiano is edited by Paolo Di Paolo and Eugenio Murrali, who together sign a chronology of the author’s life. Born in Florence in 1936, Dacia Maraini is the author of plays, poems, children’s books as well as numerous essays
The debut in 1962 – “The holiday”
The first novel by Dacia Maraini, The holiday (edizioni Lerici), came out in 1962, so next year the writer will celebrate 60 years of literary commitment. Alberto Moravia (who later became Maraini’s companion) wrote the presentation, at the request of the publisher. The book opens the Meridiano Mondadori collection dedicated to the writer, out on the 23rd.
November 21, 2021 (change November 21, 2021 | 08:54)
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