2023-06-07 18:14:35
Susanna Tamaro takes ‘pen and paper’ and replies on her Facebook page to the criticisms that rained down on her after she stated in an interview at the Turin Book Fair that “there are really difficult and even ugly texts” and concluding with the sentence “enough with Verga”. A defense of contemporary works, among which the writer had also included her most famous book, ‘Va dove ti porta il cuore’, to the detriment of the classic ones, which aroused the reprimand of the Accademia della Crusca which intervened arguing that is “unfair to attack Verga” and warning that “when she suggests replacing contemporaries with the classics, Susanna Tamaro should name the writers of the great twentieth-century style rather than herself”.
In her long post accompanied by a photograph of her intent on reading ‘Storia di una capinera’ by Verga, the author reconstructs what happened to “put an end to this depressing and useless controversy. I never said I hated Verga – the words ‘hate’ or ‘contempt’ are neither in my lexicon nor my nature – but that the Italian school makes literature hate, also adding that, of course, a passionate teacher can reverse this situation, but that on average this does not happen and that boredom and resentment often cloud the very quality of the most important authors, demeaning them “, argues Tamaro by lining up the facts that have seen her as a protagonist.
“A few days ago – he says – I wrote a long article in the Corriere, ‘Be free. Read (also Verga)’, to explain the manipulation that took place, thanks to an unfortunate title, on what I said at the Book Fair. Article which, however, was not even disseminated by the news agencies, as was done with the offending interview, leaving only the anathemas and insults against me on the web”.
“It was – underlines the writer – a video interview released in the chaos of the Book Fair and the topic was on the difficulty of getting children to read books after school. Since I have been writing children’s books since 1991, I have a bit I have the pulse of the situation, even if I am not a teacher. Primary schools, with the help of libraries, do an excellent job and make children passionate readers. In middle school, this energy continues somewhat even if it is somewhat stalled, while in high school everything shuts down and when one finishes his studies, in principle, the last thing one thinks of doing is going to the bookstore.There is no longer any curiosity towards the written word, unless they are products of influencers or phenomena born and raised on social media. So I asked myself, why does this happen? And I went back to my painful school years in which I was made to hate literature. To fall in love with Leopardi, I had to wait for thirty years , for Manzoni the fifty”.
“This I said and this is what I think. Suggesting that perhaps – the author remarks – it would be right to start reflecting on this situation or on the very method of teaching literature. At the end of the interview, already standing – you saw the chaos at the Salone? – the journalist asked me: ‘So what would you get the kids to read to get them closer to reading?’ And as I am a person who loves lightness and paradoxes, I replied ‘Maybe even ‘Go where your heart takes you” It was a joke naturally said by a person with Asperger’s who does not consider having platoons of virtual machine guns in front of him ready to to pierce it with insults and anathemas”.
“I find – underlines Susanna Tamaro – that literature, now more than ever, is a lifeline because it allows one to escape the homogenization of the media. And literature cannot be imposed as a duty but only to be suggested as a discovery and as a pleasure. I agree. with what today’s kind reader of the Piccolo di Trieste says in a beautiful letter on the meaning of literature: reading Verga’s books is like entering a painting by Segantini; it is marvelously true but, to understand it, one must be led by the hand by teachers that she had in the 70s at the classical high school”.
“Personally I think – concludes the writer – that each book is a bit like an Aladdin’s cave: you have to enter through a hole, thinking you are in a dark cavern, and then discover, walking, that that darkness hides a large number of precious stones that illuminate us and will always be part of our lives. In recent days I took advantage of the controversy to pick up ‘Storia di una capinera’, Verga’s first work that I hadn’t read yet and I’m getting lost in the wonderful descriptions of nature and walks on the slopes of Etna and in the sufferings of a girl who discovers all the chaotic inner movements of first love”.
#Hated #Verga