Gabriele Cavallini, with «Cuoio» (Einaudi, Unici series), is the winner of the XXXIII edition of the Giuseppe Berto literary prize, one of the longest-running Italian awards dedicated to first works of fiction. The verdict was announced in Capo Vaticano, in the Municipality of Ricadi, in the garden of the house that Giuseppe Berto chose as a place to live and write and where some of the most important pages of his work were born. The ceremony was conducted by the journalist and voice of Zapping on Rai Radio1 Giancarlo Loquenzi, as part of the XI edition of Estate a Casa Berto, the festival dedicated to the writer’s cultural legacy.
The jury’s motivation: «Leather is a novel of smells, entrails, rubble and stubborn violence. An ancient, irredeemable violence (…). Gabriele Cavallini writes a novel whose language flays the reader like the machines that treat the skin. He leads us into that factory of pain, among the calves that cry out their anguish, among the remains of flesh that plague the air and the soul, as in a story by Coetzee. But this is not an essay on the hidden price of luxury, of fine clothes. Cavallini does not write to point out our faults but, by telling the story of a family cursed by the habit of death, he wanders into the abysses of the human. In a real and symbolic space that recalls a story by Kafka, “In the penal colony”, where evil, since it is ineradicable, can only be engraved on the skin”.
The ceremony returned to Calabria this year, according to the traditional alternation with Mogliano Veneto, Berto’s hometown and the place where the Award was founded. Two geographically distant territories but united by the figure of the writer: the original Veneto and Capo Vaticano, where Berto chose to live for a long time and where he still rests today. Also present at the ceremony as godmother was Antonia Berto, the writer’s daughter. The other four finalists were Nikolaj Gory, with «The Chair Maker» (Meltemi); Giulio Silvano, with «They won» (Frassinelli); Beatrice Pera, with «Bagliori» (Einaudi); and Marina Zucchelli, with «Latte» (Rizzoli). The Berto Prize is promoted by the Giuseppe Berto cultural association and created in collaboration with the Municipalities of Mogliano Veneto and Ricadi.