The seven prose writers presented here are very dissimilar from one another. We did not intend to show a «movement», and not even a regular pattern in contemporary literary production. First and foremost, we wanted to select authors little known to the American public, authors that are «young» not only because of their age, but also because they are not canonized, sometimes not even in Italy. From this perspective, we decided to «bet» on some authors. Giorgio Vasta, for example, who in 2008 had just published his first novel, Il tempo materiale, and is now recognized as one of the most promising Italian young novelists. The name of Gianluigi Ricuperati was familiar to the Italian public mostly for nonfiction works, whereas the extract we publish here is part of his first, daring, novel, only recently published in Italy. Alongside these rather «new» authors we decided to include a few major – even if not mainstream – names, such as Antonio Franchini, Giulio Mozzi, and Dario Voltolini.
If we cannot speak about a new literary movement, all these authors nevertheless share some crucial features. In the first place, they all show a genuine interest in the interaction between the private and the public, between biographical events and the history or socio-economic reality of their time. The influence of 60’s and 70’s American New Journalism is evident. Laura Pugno depicts the psychological pressures of isolation with scrupulous recounting of the precise names of geographical features, audio-visual equipment, and cosmetic accessories; Nicola Lagioia offers an intimate depiction of the Italian Zeitgeist of the 80’s and 90’s, revisiting the tradition of the Bildungsroman in the light of a postmodern sensibility. Dario Voltolini realistically renders the topography of Amsterdam and the thoughts of a common man, before ending his narrative with an almost metaphysical light that gives the whole story an unexpected meaning.
As Voltolini’s conclusion shows, however, these writers also depart from the model advocated by Tom Wolfe in his famous introduction in New Journalism and epitomized by Capote’s In Cold Blood. Although their Italian descendants believe in the immediacy of fact, they do not shy from filtering the facts through a pronounced subjectivity that blurs the line between fiction and non-fiction. These authors also look to some different models, such as Philip Roth and his numerous autofictions, or Joan Didion’s intense memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, among others. More generally, all of the authors presented here are conversant with American culture, with no distinction between highbrow and lowbrow, from the theological analyses of Wendy Doniger in Franchini’s Signore delle lacrime to the pop music of the 80’s and 90’s used by La Gioia and Ricuperati as a way to catch and depict the Zeitgeist. American culture is perceived by these authors – especially those born at the end of the Sixties and after – as liberating them from the austere academicism of «artistic prose» on the one hand, and from the ingenious – but sometimes sterile – works of the neoavanguardia on the other hand. It is not by chance that David Foster Wallace is one of the most cited writer in the Italian debate on the novel. His essay E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction has been incredibly influential in Italy: the need, discussed by Wallace in his essay, to overcome postmodern cynicism and recuperate a new, and more sincere, depiction of human sentiments, has become an almost a programmatic goal for many Italian authors.
A newfound interest in human feelings and emotions represented in a credible – if not realistic – manner is, in fact, one of the most evident common points shared by the authors we present here. Ricuperati’s piece, for example, uses depression to deeply engage the reader in a «sentimental journey» of raw emotions; the estranging story by Vasta cannot mask over the underlying compassion for our humanity. Writing about the desire of having someone collect our secretions and parts of our bodies – our teeth and hair, the cells of our skin – Vasta seems to hint in a weirdly original way at a basic need – and longing – for a stable identity and a wish to last through time.
The return to an idea of the novel as a privileged vehicle for self-knowledge and investigation of the world through the lens of personal experience is not simply a return to the realistic novel, but rather an attempt to shape a new novel able at the same time to emotively touch the reader and face the issues of today’s society. While the earlier generation experimented mainly on the level of language – sometimes to the degree of dissolving plot and characters into language-games – all these authors play with genres, blending together different forms of prose such as the memoir, the journalistic piece, and the essay.
Along with Dario Voltolini – whose I confini di Torino is a luminous example of Italian creative nonfiction – Antonio Franchini and Giulio Mozzi are easily the other contemporary «fathers» of the Italian hybrid novel. L’abusivo by Antonio Franchini, published in 2001, is one of the first and most successful examples of a mix of journalistic inquiry, novel, and memoir that has become mainstream thanks to Saviano’s Gomorrah. In his collection, Fiction, also published in 2001, Mozzi challenges the readers’ trust through stories whose truth is patently ambiguous and thereby draws attention to the the problem of realistic representations in today’s mass-media society .
Franchini, Mozzi, and Voltolini use a hybrid writing not only to show «facts», but mainly to reach that point where daily life opens up and reveals a deeper truth. The most realistic stories are punctuated by sudden insights, nigh epiphanies of the ineffable. The pieces we present here confirm this pattern: we have already remembered the metaphysical light that transfigures Voltolini’s description; in the same way, in Mozzi’s story the description of today’s painting techniques is transcended by the allusions to the religious pictures of Caravaggio and the discussion on the mysterious «stato di grazia» that the painter should reach in order to capture a reality beyond natural phenomena. In Franchini’s piece, the lesson on Italian gastronomy quickly turns into a melancholic reminiscence of a friend’s death, evolving into a subtle reflection upon the very possibility of founding one’s identity on memory.
The authors we present here are not the only ones we believe representative of contemporary Italian prose writing. We could have selected many others, or different, ones. As David Foster Wallace pointed out in his Introduction to the «Best American Essays» in 2007 – no collection can be complete and every selection is necessarily the result of many compromises between the personalities and the competences of all the people involved in the editing process. Three authors in particular, whom we did not select for this issue, deserve special mention. There is no doubt that Mario Desiati, Antonio Pascale, and Eraldo Affinati would have enriched this issue of Chicago Review. Their contribution would also have confirmed that the most interesting prose writing today in Italy shows the two main features we have briefly highlighted in this introduction: the urge to reinvigorate the form of the novel through the hybridization of fiction and non- fiction, and a profound ethical drive that is not the result of a political or ideological take on reality, but the expression of a genuine interest in human beings and their complex relationships with one another and with the world they inhabit.
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