By Walter Ego
On the occasion of the launch in England of his latest novel Margherita Dolce Vita (Europa Editions 2006), Stefano Benni, one of the most renowned and beloved Italian authors of his generation, has met at the Italian Cultural Institute Jonathan Coe, whose last novel is The Closed Circle (Penguin Paperback 2005). What happens when two great authors meet to discuss about their lives and their works? The result is a tasting mix of tragic depth and ironic lightness that has involved the large audience making them reflect and smile.
The meeting, “refereed” by Enrico Franceschini – London correspondent for the Italian newspaper La Repubblica – saw one winner only: culture! Of particular effect, in my opinion, was the way our “duellers” recounted their different approach to the means of writing: Stefano prefers to write articles directly by the computer, whilst for novels is still in love with the old typewriter, that in an age during which everything has to be fast allows you to slow down and perhaps to think more, because to erase one word you have to take the sheet out, tear it, put a new one in and rewrite everything… Jonathan, on the contrary, is an “addicted” to the computer and said that once he had found himself to think that he could not write anything without his laptop, just to realise few seconds later, with some embarrassment, that with a pen and a sheet of paper is still possible to create… but whilst our Stefano maintains, and perhaps hopes, that books, with their materiality, will last forever, Jonathan is already thinking about the future, to the e-book, a support that will allow to have available all the books we want, the whole culture, in a medium as attractive as a book but not as limitative.
It comes to mind the dualism of the slow food of Italian origins against the fast food that seems to lord here in Albion, but at least in this case different approaches produce both a superfine quality product. The large audience present liked the verbal encounter, participating with some questions equally divided between the two authors, and that in the end enlightened how two different ways to brave the art of writing have been presented, but with one leading thread only: quality.
We have had the pleasure to read an English copy of Margherita Dolce Vita. The story is set in a not better identified suburb of a town in the North of Italy, where the rural tranquillity of a family life is broken by the arrival of the new neighbours – and of their strange house – who look like coming out of a glossy magazine cover: they are rich, good-looking, perfect… maybe too much. Almost everybody is charmed by the new neighbours’ way of doing things and most of all of appearing: Margherita’s father is charmed by his counterpart, a successful businessman. But what kind of business? Margherita’s mother by the lady, who looks like one of her favourite soap opera’s characters. The iper-hormonic eldest son, Margherita’s brother, falls in love with the as-much-beautiful-as-stupid neighbours’ daughter. Three persons only seem to be immune to the enchantment: the loony old grandfather, soon victim of a strange accident, the genius Margherita’s younger brother, held at bay by the neighbours with the latest videogames, and the protagonist Margherita Dolce Vita, an intelligent and dreamy girl, the only one who will actually try to find out what happens inside the enormous black cube in which the neighbours live.
Stefano Benni lets us to be taken by hand by the protagonist, who page after page accompanies us in this journey towards the search for an uncomfortable and dangerous truth. It is a journey on the irony’s thread that will often make the reader laugh, and will make our protagonist know love, fear, pain and truth.
Copyright 2006 GIORGIOSTUDIO – All rights reserved |
