At the Strega, narrative without imagination is rampant: it is the Prize for second-hand literature

Yesterday evening at the Ninfeo del Premio Strega a friend, a screenwriter, commented on the shortlist as follows: “We should review the history of literature in light of the current, pervasive fashion of autofiction…. Emma Bovary would write her own novel, without Flaubert!”. Of the 12 titles in the first selection , only about ten belong to the varied area of ​​non-fiction: biographies, portraits, autobiographies, reportage, family investigations and indeed autofiction. The impression is that of a somewhat parasitic narrative, always made in the wake of something else, in short second-hand (a second-hand literature?).

You know, the greatest trick the gods play on us is to grant our dreams! In the 90s, I dreamed of a literature less obsessed with the novel form, in which non-fiction, so typical of our literary tradition, had more space. Since then, non-fiction has overflowed, filling the entire literary horizon: see the Strega in Nesi, Piccolo, Albinati, Siti, Janeczek, Trevi. The phenomenon becomes worrying and betrays a lack of imagination and inspiration (and even experience: we only look for it in family albums!). Luce d'Eramo said that she wrote to disappear inside the characters she created. Current autofiction not only does not make the author disappear, but reaffirms him in all his cumbersome ego. It makes him disappear behind himself! The 2025 Strega Prize was won by the favorite - Andrea Bajani - and, I add, the most deserving. I'll come back to that in a bit. Furthermore, my (wicked) prediction that this year the five finalists, after being dressed by the most famous stylists in the last edition, would each cook a gourmet dish on stage with the Masterchef chefs, was denied! None of this. They only answered the very polite questions of Pino Strabioli, after a short video that tried to tell their story in a few minutes. There on that stage they all seemed like writers waiting for a Nobel Prize.

But let's quickly review the top five. First just a comment on Minister Giuli, absent because he never received the books in the top five. Strange: Giuli is a postmodern political leader, Gramscian and Evolian, fascist and communist, enlightened and a devotee of the esoteric, unlimitedly fluid, protean, but on one point he is uncompromising: as a reader of the Strega! By the young Michele Ruol, Inventario di quel che resta dopo che la foresta brucia, I find the narrative idea of ​​telling an unbearable mourning (the loss of children) – through objects – original. The narration investigates the feelings of Mother and Father with extreme modesty. Only a few stylistic lapses, due to hasty editing. For example: " The clothes were only a synecdoche of change". It is not incorrect in itself, but it is very much the cultural jargon of the educated middle class. Nadia Terranova ( Quello che so di te ) confirms her talents and explores a family saga that seems distant but in reality speaks painfully of her, of her dilemmas. And she does so with penetration and psychological acumen. However, perhaps the madness, the mental illness (of her great-grandmother) required a more radical and dissonant writing.

Elisabetta Rasy ( Lost is this sea ) suggests a literary suggestive short circuit between the figures of the father and Dudù La Capria, against the backdrop of a witchy, sunny, Virgilian Naples… At ease in the story of the most hidden interiority, within a Morantian narration of ghosts. It is true, as she says, that appearances are very rarely deceiving, confirming the value of romantic physiognomy. And it is true that for each of us – as for Aeneas – destiny does not coincide with our own nature (and it always wins!). The author reminds us that in life we ​​always lose something (a love, a friendship, a parent, the “sea”, the happiness of adolescence….). The aforementioned novel The Bridge of San Luis Rey by Thornton Wilder comes to mind: “ …love will have been enough and all the impulses of love return to the love from which they came. There is a land of the living and the dead, and the bridge is love” . Just an observation, very personal. I have frequented La Capria (although much less than her): the “complexity” of the writer is represented here, however I would like to see his less conciliatory underground, which even denies the “common sense” dear to him, explored. The incredible discovery, at ninety years old, of plebeian Naples by seeing “Passione ” by Turturro.

Paolo Nori dedicates Chiudo la porta e urlo to the poet Raffaello Baldini, from Santarcangelo. As in all his other works, he has a “voice” that immediately enters your head, a vibrant mimesis of speech, but of the speech of someone who reasons to the bitter end, who mulls over, syllogizes, questions himself, dwells on details. Like a madman from the Po Valley, of the kind described by Malerba, Celati, Cavazzoni … Of course he continually risks a high mannerism, with his accurate and ultimately cloying falsetto: “That he was someone, I had seen him for the first time in a film called L'aria serena dell'Ovest, which was a film I had seen by mistake… ”. However, it is a collection of little thoughts and aphorisms (on literature and life), full of humor and melancholy.

In Bajani 's " The Anniversary " there is a sentence, at the beginning, very harsh (like the whole book) and in its own way spectacular: " I would say years ago, that day, I saw my parents for the last time. Since then I have changed phone number, house, continent, I have put up an impregnable wall, I have put an ocean in between. They have been the ten best years of my life ". The author has dealt head-on, recklessly, with the Italian ghost par excellence: the Family. Insinuating the suspicion that behind the wealthy emigration of many young people lies the desire to escape from those who brought them into the world! Bajani has had to cool the entire subject too much, perhaps to protect himself in turn. At times his prose, although clear, seems almost formalized and bureaucratized. I open at random: “In the midst of that little circumstance steeped in fear…the visit was scheduled for the following week ” (or even the use of such a conventionally literary term as “ contezza ”).

But the memorable portrait of the mother remains: not an overflowing mother like the one in Franchini's Il fuoco che ti porta dentro, but an absent, invisible mother who has always given up on life (only the polio-affected leg " violated that invisibility, condemned her to be seen" ). Remember Thornton Wilder ? The bridge - between the living and the dead, between the visible and the invisible - is love (to succeed in portraying the mother, Bajani loved her, in a heartbreaking way). Literature has the sole task of "showing us" that bridge, which often seems impossible. Not "saying" it (that would become didactic), but "showing" it to us, yes.

FROM

Philip The Door