A story whose idea was born from having learned that the Swiss government was looking for “secret services agents with a particular ability: to know how to speak the Calabrian dialect well”. So says Daniele Pronestì, Calabrian of Polistena but lived between Copenhagen and New York, for his first beautiful novel, “The reasons for instinct” (Bompiani) starring Giuseppe Bellingeri of Morgese (a sort of Vigàta who alludes to Polistena and in honor of San Giorgio Morgeto), but also included in the great dynamics of the world, being a secret agent, who still has a lot of age, I hope he will soon return to speak », Pronestì anticipates us.
The story, which begins with a femicide, behind which organized crime, underworld, but also omissions and gattopardo attitudes of the province are, is told with a language between Calabrian and Italian well included in the speech and in the thoughts of the characters. “A choice – says Pronestì, who works for an important Italian financial institution – to return thought, posture and vices to the actors of the book, immersed in a social fauna in which French -speaking immigrants, Chinese of the rice fields, new northern and old Calabrians find themselves living and colliding. I knew that the dialect would be a dangerous narrative device, so I dosed it carefully, so as not to betray its strength and not reduce it to folkloric. The book speaks of us humans and therefore the dialect works like a lens, not as an ornament, perhaps for this reason Peppe Bellingeri and the others manage to be appreciated even outside the borders of the region ».
A courageous choice made by many, from Camilleri onwards. And there was, after all, the will to clear it this, among the Calabrian dialects, so strong and expressive?
«I never warned any aware affinity with Camilleri from a stylistic point of view even if many, reading the book, told me to have heard of it the echo. More than clears my language, I was interested in putting the image given to those who speak it in crisis. And the dialect seemed to me a necessary starting point to tell what I think I know in my territory, namely that the archetype of the Calabrian is not declining in the simple combination ‘nduja -‘nrangheta ».
A peculiarity of the novel is the bestiary, explained at the bottom of the volume, to represent human types. Suggestions from ancient classics or other literatures?
«The literary tradition to which I draw from Aesop and reaches up to the recent Japanese literature, a country that I particularly passionate about. However, the partial associations that European narrative gives to the animal theme, such as Volpe equal cleverness do not satisfy me. Civilization and literature associate a lapidary and elementary role with the animal, reserving only the value of complexity for us humans. Still, we humans are animals. That’s why in the book there are human and animal characters on par and not surprisingly the book begins with a femicide, an act that society often tries to bring back to a motive or a raptus, to reason or its absence. Killing is a bestial act, without humanity we boast of ».
Who is Peppe Bellingeri, a wolf in his bestiary.
«Bellingeri is a fragile contemporary male, a wolf because he feels the lack of a pack while not denying a certain pleasure for solitude. It is not a seducer and in fact with the female characters a complete idiot will prove. It represents the disorientation of my generation and in fact often moves between irony and sadness, animated by a personal morality and perhaps representative of the southern young people: cultured, but inevitably linked to a world in which modernity can be a disease. The fact that it is a secret agent, far from the 007 we know, also serves to tell a slice of Italy, made of honest that still live in the shadows ».
You deal with strong themes such as the situation of immigrants (with all the stratification of a certain system), organized crime, the underworld, the secrets of the province.
«I don’t like books in which moral distinctions are clear. I liked the idea of writing for slacings, through lacerations, slabbing precisely the boundaries of species, moral, narration and language. No character can define himself totally innocent or guilty, as in life. Misery and beauty, instinct and reason also coexist in high -high and professionalized environments. The predatory instinct of men and women exists both among the bergamot fields in Calabria as among the skyscrapers of Milan. In the book this is expressed by the Pitace family, a dynasty of birds of prey and landowners capable of enriching themselves through the overpowering of the laborers and the connivances of the unions. We are all a little faulty, so also the characters who have an existence, perhaps a humanity, which must be treated and happens ».
In thanks, he writes: “The rest of the story is attributable to the relationship between me and my land and my personal vision of things”.
“Through my experience abroad I understood that any migrant is only the purgatory. The humanity of the book I think is in the conflict between abandoning one’s country and returning to you, as Bellingeri does in his country, where few bonds strange affections still live while they persist bags of misery and civil immaturity precisely in rich and unexpected places. My personal vision of things is this: what makes us human is to repair what we make every day every day. They are precisely the reasons for our instincts “.
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