2023-07-19 15:17:06
Time.news – Winning the Bancarella Award with your debut book is breathtaking, doing it by telling the story of your great-grandmother is a priceless emotion. Francesca Giannone, author of ‘La portalettere’, a novel published by Nord and a stable presence in the rankings since its release in January 2023, enjoys the success and the result and is preparing for the film adaptation of this story which, set in the 1930s and the 60s remains very topical. We interviewed her.
This novel fits into a vein that is familiar to us: a story with very strong female figures and, above all, that of Anna, the first woman from southern Italy to win a competition to become a postwoman
It’s a story that belongs to me, because Anna was my great-grandmother, and which I discovered through a business card found in a drawer and which included name, surname and the wording ‘mail carrier’.
A story of ordinary heroism, considering the era…
The story of a woman who arrives from Liguria in Salento and performs a revolutionary act, a heroic gesture, while obviously not being a heroine and still remaining a human being, with her frailties, her weaknesses.
A story that has been locked in a drawer for years. Is it possible that this revolutionary grandmother was never mentioned at table on Sundays?
It is precisely because this feat has been forgotten for decades that I wrote this novel: to restore its memory. It all started with a business card of which there are only two examples left. It was there in a drawer along with other black and white photos. I knew my great-grandmother was a postwoman but no one had told me that she was the first in southern Italy. Her feat was not only taken for granted, but perhaps it was not fully understood and valued, not only by my family, but by the community, by the country, which fortunately is now rediscovering this fellow citizen. Even if it is not a family saga, through Anna it tells the story of a family that we have followed for two generations. A family at the center of which there is a very important conflict, which is the leitmotif of the novel: two brothers in love with the same woman, a very painful conflict that we follow until the last page
If she had been from Puglia instead of Ligurian, would she have made such a revolutionary choice?
I do not know this. However, it must be said that before her no woman in the village had thought of participating in the post office competition to become a mail carrier. In my opinion it depended on the fact that she had a solid education behind her, unlike perhaps many other women who had barely attended elementary school. She presents herself to the competition and wins it thanks to the fact that she has a higher level of education than men.
We have a very strong love story and a story of empowerment. Are the ingredients for the perfect story for this historic moment?
I started writing this novel without thinking at all about the publication or about the audience that would then read it. I just knew I had to write it. The moment I found that business card, I decided I had to tell it, without any editorial pressure. I brought this novel to life in what I later renamed ‘liberated writing’. I didn’t follow trends, I didn’t think about an audience. But then somehow his audience found him. Probably the fact of writing without conditioning was also a trump card: the readers felt that there was a heart and not a narrative machine.
She, like the protagonist of her book, made a particular choice: she studied cinematography in Rome, writing in Bologna and then returned to Lizzanello, the town where the novel is set. Why this choice?
I followed in Anna’s footsteps without knowing it. I spent a few years away from her, then at a certain point I decided to go home, to my land, to give her back something of all that I had assimilated and collected. And it was only once I returned to Salento that I came across this story. Somehow maybe it was written that she should go this way.
Frances Giannone
She is also a painter and her painting is very focused on female figures. She is a storyteller, she studied cinematography, so she knows cinematic narrative canons very well and this is also seen in her novel. How important is it to have the technical tools but be able to look into one’s roots to build a story?
It’s very important because you can’t improvise storytellers. I studied at the experimental center of cinematography, I attended the writing school founded by Carlo Lucarelli in Bologna, the Bottega Finzioni, which gave me the tools with which to handle narrative material. And awareness is needed, just the desire to write a story and passion are not enough. Not even talent is enough, because talent is useless if you don’t have the tools to be able to handle it. So I think it’s important to have the tools of the trade, a toolbox, which is essential when you’re about to write a novel, which means hundreds and hundreds of pages and years of work. You need to know how to build a narrative system that holds up and if you don’t have these tools you risk not making it. It’s not enough to be a strong reader to be able to write.
There were six finalists for the Bancarella award, three men and three women. The Strega finalists were five, four women and one man. In total we can say that up to now there is a prevalence of the female world and there is also a strong presence of stories of female emancipation. Is it a theme that has its own urgency to be told?
I think there was a bit of a lack of the female gaze on things, which is different from the male one. How many women have been told to us through the eyes of men? Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, there are memorable characters, told by men. Having the female point of view on things is probably something that readers were missing.
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