It comes out on Tuesday 15 for Einaudi L’umanit un internship, a memoir (or almost) of the Neapolitan writer. Memories and books, Heart that made you cry and then laugh: life
When Domenico Starnone writes that this book is the result of old age, the least sensible period of existence, don’t believe him. Do not believe him because in Humanity is an apprenticeship (Einaudi) what comes next, what he makes the opposite happen: tumult, discovery, doubt, enchantment. There is no point of arrival, as for books read in youth that re-read after many years show sides not seen at the time, acquire beauty where there seemed to be a defect, an error. The author admits: I like all the errors, all the oversights, all the blunders — his is a declaration of poetics, and at the same time a look.
So this book is not simply a collection of writings, rather a selection that becomes a portrait. charcoal drawing, like that of the hand which appeared in half-sleep which refers to other paintings of hands: It does not hide the sketch and the erasure, but puts them on stage. Thus the work is no longer the highly refined result of a work, but its creation through trial and error.
Exactly the path of the narrator in this book, and in Starnone’s work in general.
Here the ego breaks in, disappears, now scolds, now adult Starnone who blames adolescent Starnone, contradicts him. Humanity is an apprenticeship is a forgetful autobiography, a lying memoir, a coming-of-age tale of a boy who thought he had no right to literature and struggled with dialect. That boy who was studying to be a writer like him imagined that the writer should be, and he made an effort to speak the Italian of the man on the news; the young man who gave up writing because he felt he lacked her and his family – lack of material and immaterial inheritance, he defines it.
There is no place for him, he concludes.
And not a conclusion. With Raffaele La Capria he discovers that Naples, apparently unspeakable, can be told. With Natalia Ginzburg he learns that the newspaper can be narrated by inventing a language. And then: the point of view, the voice — what would John Fante’s work be without the voice of Arturo Bandini? Or Federigo Tozzi’s ego that appears shy as if it were a mistake, actually a sign of disguise. The history of these disguises should be made. A list should be made of how many good, if not memorable, female characters were born from the male need to acquire freedom of expression. Generally, when Flaubert says: Madame Bovary is me, among many other things he ends up also saying: Madame Bovary not Madame Bovary.
Starnone analyzes, breaks down, and at the same time stages, making reader and writer visible.
So reading Cat in the rain by Hemingway, where the woman who can no longer see the cat she wanted to take is given a ceramic cat instead, Starnone boy gets excited, he finds the kind of writer he wants to be (one who rules the chaos of reality with the elixir of fiction, one who makes sorrowful ladies happy with tiled cats). Except realizing, years later, that it is a translation error. Hemingway wrote: a big tortoiseshell cat, or a live tortoiseshell cat. The translator’s tiled cat. And here the despotic narrator intervenes to decide that no, he doesn’t care about the tortoiseshell cat, he chooses the mistake: Cats and cats and majolica cats, he hopes.
Cats and cats are the gaze, the story in spite of reality, of what one wants to be true and unique.
And that Starnone does not believe in uniqueness, in the fait accompli, he demonstrates by dating the principle of his desire to write: Was originally the stork, He says. However, a night of parental quarrel is added to the stork. The same stork then becomes two, or in any case shows two faces: the one that will bring the little brother, designed by the father (the Feder of Via Gemito), and the one the midwife or aunt talks about to justify the blood-stained sheets: The stork brought his little brother, but then he wanted to take him back, and your father, thank goodness, killed her.
Two faces the stork, two faces the father. Undefined face who gives the news (aunt or midwife): as if to attest that literature is light on some, and mist on others.
Starnone doubles, multiplies. Set cardinal points to move in the intermediate stretch: The more I was able to stop in the space between if and no.
Books like Heart di Edmondo De Amicis, o Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad perform the function of whether or not, or rather: the six are not the readings in different ages. Child cries on certain pages of Heartthe same ones he laughed at fifteen years later.
Teenager gets annoyed by Marlow’s interference in Jim’s story: why not let the young hero speak directly, rather than the fifty-year-old Marlow who pretends to love Jim, and instead ridicules him? Years go by, and the adult understands that without Marlow Lord Jim would only be a good book of adventures, and vice versa through Marlow it becomes a book about longing, about desire, and about the time that is no more: Marlow looks at Jim from outside, and looking at him, looks at himself. Warning: isn’t this, this too, humanity an apprenticeship? Adult Starnone looking at teenage Starnone? Domenico Starnone makes his Lord Jim out of himself as a boy.
Possible? The narrator of the book would answer I don’t know, as he answers the many questions aimed at pigeonholing a novel, a character: I don’t know, I don’t know, he says, and in the I don’t know retorted there is the possibility of be everything. The imperfect play of children – I was the princess – that the writer explains, and uses at the same time. Therefore the portrait of himself that emerges does not follow a chronology, nor an identity given forever: There is nothing that is given once and for all in a story.
The double, the contradiction, the thousand Franti who are his students, the cats, all the cats. So: Humanity is an apprenticeship not the formation of a reader, nor of a writer, but the formation of Domenico Starnone – whoever he is (among many: one of the greatest living writers). And that Starnone is many individuals he establishes in this non-linear time, which jumps, advances, retreats, giving the idea of the simultaneity of the roles: student, high school teacher, beginning writer, established writer, son of Feder, railwayman, painter who laments: I am not understood in Naples (Via Gemito). Domenico Starnone can be everything. That’s why you shouldn’t believe him when he writes that this book is the fruit of old age, don’t believe him: a lot still has to happen.
Agenda
The humanities an internship of Domenico Starnone comes out on Tuesday 14, for Einaudi (pp. 302, euro 18). Starnone (Saviano, Naples, February 15, 1943) lives in Rome. He made his debut in 1987 with Former professorship (Rossoscuola and Il manifesto). Now his books are published by Einaudi.
The author will present Humanity is an apprenticeship in Rome on Saturday 18 February, at 11, with Annalena Benini and Antonio Gnoli (Spazio Sette Libreria, via dei Barbieri, 7; reservations recommended by email: info@ spaziottelibreria.it)
February 12, 2023 (change February 12, 2023 | 14:06)
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