2024-01-05 23:36:55
The writer recounts «The splinters»: «A hyper-realistic novel, full of sexual descriptions and politically incorrect, as it has always been».
«Many years ago I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks to be written in the same way as you fall in love with someone: the dream becomes irresistible, there is nothing you can do, and finally you give in and succumb even if your instinct tells you to run away because it could be, after all, a dangerous game – in which someone will probably get hurt.” (The Shards, the incipit)
We’ve been waiting for it for 13 years and it’s arrived: 742 highly inspired pages, a formidable return that nails you to the page and makes you devour it. «The splinters» also makes me nervous, due to certain long panoramic digressions, certain redundant taxonomy. But then you end up entangled in it and emerge overwhelmed by an inexorable thriller mechanism, dragged into the 80s, between hardcore sex, displayed luxury, splatter drifts, cocaine and quaaludes in rivers. A few months after its release, it has remained in our circulation. And so we talk about it with the writer Giuseppe Culicchia, who has admirably translated «The Shards», but also four other novels by Ellis.
How do you translate an Ellis novel? How long did it take you?
«It took me six months. I did a first draft, then a reread. I translated it by reading it, I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.”
I read it while simultaneously listening to the music mentioned, Ultravox, Split Enz, Icehouse. The music of our adolescence and other music we have never heard. An incredible playlist.
«I translated it like this too, each time looking for the songs he quoted. Even though he mostly listened to new wave, while I was more punk.”
His writing is a spell. How does he manage to hypnotize the reader like this? And how did you keep up the pace?
«Respecting punctuation. It’s something I care a lot about: you have to be rigorous. Punctuation is rhythm, musicality. His is hyper-realistic writing.”
Full of details.
«Ellis writes books that are catalogues. It’s his strength. Like David Hockney, the one about the swimming pools, whom he quotes: you seem to see a painting of him, where the details are very clear. Even the descriptions of the crimes. Some images never leave me.”
“I remembered what Robert Mallory had said as we stood in front of the Gap at the Galleria store in Sherman Oaks next week: ‘When you talk to me, dude, you’re really talking to yourself.’ It sounded like some sinister hippie nonsense that Charles Manson might have uttered, and I shuddered to remember Robert saying that to me.”
And then the dialogues.
«It’s his trademark. One of the most difficult things to render in a novel is dialogue. His words are always credible. You seem to hear the voices of the characters.”
Sometimes all this precision, this obsessive accumulation of details is tiring and boring. Both Melissa Broder wrote it in the New York Times and Sam Byers in the Guardian. One wonders if the length, of the sentences and of the book, is not an error, if more editing work were not necessary. Or it’s the opposite. Perhaps certain panoramic descriptions are part of the mechanism, of psychedelic writing.
«It’s just his style. Even in Glamorama and American Psycho there were very long descriptions, the clothes, the brands, the streets. One of his models, I don’t know if I’m aware of it, is Moby Dick. It’s a way to envelop yourself in his world, like a python. As for long sentences, you just need to know how to write them. He thinks of Thomas Bernhard.”
In his own small way, also to Marcel Proust.
«That’s it. In “Less than Zero” Ellis used much shorter sentences. Think about the incipit. Then, in the subsequent books, he changed his style a bit.”
«People are afraid of jumping into freeway traffic in Los Angeles. It’s the first thing I hear when I return to the city. Blair comes to pick me up at the airport and I hear her mutter this phrase as she walks up the access ramp.” (incipit of «Meno di Zero», translation by Marisa Caramella)
His vocabulary is simple, he never wants to surprise the reader with complex constructions or words that are too difficult.
«It is in line with the tradition of 20th century American literature, from Hemingway onwards. Even Raymond Carver.”
Ellis says he is inspired by the style of Joan Didion, who had a cold and clear prose, a frozen minimalism, barely warmed by the California sun.
«It’s true, he has always loved Didion and books like White Album».
«I wanted to be like Susan Reynolds. And I also wanted to write that way: insensitivity as a feeling, insensitivity as a motive, insensitivity as a reason to exist, insensitivity as ecstasy.” (Splinters)
There are those who consider his books, including the latest one, as empty, superficial, condensed of aesthetic nihilism.
«Ellis was often not understood. It happened to Jonathan Swift, when he wrote that to solve the problem of hunger it was enough to eat children. It was the 18th century, however. A few hundred years have passed in vain.”
Ellis’ books, in reality, talk about the commodification of personality, feelings and life. They are novels so superficial that they are very profound.
«American Psycho was a ferocious satire on capitalism, on a world devoid of values. The sensational thing is that when it came out, and even after, not only angry feminists and improvised critics but also people of a certain intellectual stature mistook it for a hymn to Patrick Bateman, to cynicism, to crime, while it was a very harsh criticism of the system. It is no coincidence that Bateman’s idol was Donald Trump, who was then just a tycoon.”
Ellis never holds back his pen, has the ability to tell even the most unpleasant truths and has an anti-sentimental style. He doesn’t care about political correctness.
«Thank goodness, he’s a free person. And then how do you write in a politically correct way? If you have someone like Bateman, how do you do it? A writer shouldn’t judge his characters. Unfortunately, many writers self-censor. We live in an era that recalls the Salem witch hunts, the one staged by Arthur Miller in “The Crucible”. A climate that on the one hand is ridiculous, on the other it is scary. A colleague told me that she was translating a writer’s novel with a racist character and the author doesn’t use the word nigger, so as not to offend readers, but “n” with an ellipsis. How you do it? If someone is racist, he says nigger not n…”.
Even on sex and homosexuality, in «Schegge», he did not hold back.
“He explained well how at the time he couldn’t declare his homosexuality and how the relationships were there but clandestine.”
It has been noted that on that front the world of homosexuals is not doing very well. Ellis claimed the right to speak about it freely.
“Of course. Homosexuality is neutral from this point of view. Even Ernst Röhm, the head of the Nazi SA, was homosexual.”
In «Schegge» sex is everywhere and the homosexual scenes are repeated and in great detail. Isn’t it a little provocative and isn’t it a provocation that’s a little out of time?
«But no, his sex, like his writing, is hyper-realistic. The issue with sex in novels is whether it is necessary or not. In this case it is and it doesn’t seem disturbing to me, any more than certain afternoon television. As for provocation, perhaps there is more need of it now. In the 70s and 80s, the bigots came from the right, just think of the ban on Tondelli’s “Altri libertini” in 1980. Today it comes from the left, from those who proclaim themselves tolerant. A world in reverse, to quote Vannacci.”
“A seventeen-year-old driving around on Mullholland in a Mercedes convertible wearing a private school uniform and a pair of Wayfarers is an image from a certain period of empire that I was, at times, aware of – did I look like a dick? I asked myself fleetingly – before saying to myself: I look so cool I don’t give a damn.”
Is «Schegge» a memoir? Is what he says true or false? It seems like the story of an autobiography but at a certain point you begin to doubt the reliability of the narrator.
«It’s his style, Ellis has always played with ambiguity. If you reread Glamorama and American Psycho, you ask yourself a lot of questions. There is a part of Lunar Park which is an autobiography, it tells all true things and then at a certain point there is a marriage with a Hollywood actress who never existed. As for Shards, Ellis definitely went to Buckley, and lived in post-Charles Manson Los Angeles. The figure of the serial killer was recurrent in those years. The murder of Sharon Tate dates back to ’69. There were many trawlers.”
By the way, why did you translate “the trawler” as “trawler”? Were there other options? Did you have doubts?
«No, it was right. The serial killer in question uses fish several times, in an unpleasant and bizarre way. And he captures the victims like this, he spreads a net and brings them to shore.”
Ellis, before publishing it, made a podcast of it, during Covid. Now Luca Guadagnino will direct an HBO series based on «Schegge». With all the “cliffhangers” there are, the pauses in moments of tension, the suspense and the twists, it seems perfect for a serial.
«Probably yes, although I don’t know much about it. I’ve only seen one series, Fargo, and I didn’t like it at all, unlike the film.”
Your latest novel is «The little girl who shouldn’t cry», Mondadori. Do you take inspiration from Ellis in your writing?
«I discovered it with the first translations for Tullio Pironti by Francesco Durante, which I always regret as a person and as an author. I have always loved it and when Einaudi asked me to translate it for me it was a great emotion. Let’s say that perhaps Marisa Caramella, who asked me at the time, saw something in my writing that was close to that of Ellis.”
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