Moved and ready to tell her story, that’s what she said she was Annie ErnauxNobel Prize for Literature 2022, a Pordenonelaw where he received the Crédit Agricole Prize «The story in a novel», now in its sixteenth edition. And she, who stripped herself of her most intimate thoughts, handing them over to readers with that transpersonal self with which she shaped her writings which combine literature, sociology and history, reiterated that she had not told her life but just her life.
«I consider myself to have been crossed by a time in history, certainly also by my experience, but what is of interest is not so much my life but what has passed through my writing. I have a spatial impression of writing, when I write I descend into writing; instead, I emerge from it when I read.” And she adds that she is happy to find herself in Pordenone, where in 2018 she received the Hemingway Prize, also because Hemingway was her role model, fundamental to her education.
It’s natural – he says – to have models and between Simone de Beauvoir, Virginia Woolf, Georges Perec, his thoughts go above all to de Beauvoir. «At 18 she was my ideal, not of writing but of life; I would have liked to be like her, with the “pact of freedom” with Sartre, even if her aristocratic world was very far from mine. But Claire Etcherelli was also a model for me with her 1967 novel, “Elisa or the True Life”. This is how “Il posto” was born, about my father and “Una donna” about my mother». Her journey in writing with realism in the foreground was a way of emancipating herself and at the same time making others aware of the possibility of another type of life. «André Gide said that the novel is closer to the truth than a non-fictional account. However, I believe that it is not a question of truth but of reality, of rewriting it through writing.”
Rewriting reality through narrative fictionthis is the deal with writing also Mariolina Venice, which in Pordenonelegge received the Friuli Venezia Giulia Award, “A tale of places and time”, established by the autonomous Region of Friuli Venezia Giulia with the Pordenonelegge Foundation. With the story “Ritorni” Venezia described Trieste knowing how to «perceive its soul with an original gaze» (thus the jury’s motivations): a challenge for the writer who gave birth to the exuberant Imma Tataranni, the deputy prosecutor from Matera protagonist of her detective stories who will be on TV from 25 September for the third series dedicated to her.
«Since there is a pact of sincerity between me and writing – said Venezia – I did not want to write a hagiographic story of Trieste, but also highlight the contradictions, contrasts and lacerations of the city. For me it is necessary to enter places, talk to them, and Trieste, in a mysterious way, spoke to me. Her soul appeared to me on an almost apocalyptic morning, but the distance, often as necessary as proximity, was certainly also useful to me in describing places.”
Her Basilicata also asked to be told through the eyes of a paradoxical character like Tataranni: this too was a challenge for the winner of the 2006 Campiello Prize with «A thousand years that I’ve been here». Because Imma, «which everyone likes without wanting to please anyone and has brought together women and men, South and North, was born with my decision to write detective stories while, paradoxically, the detective stories I dealt with as a screenwriter I was tired.” And yet another challenge is underway with a novel in maturation set in Istanbul, as Venice reveals in a preview. «It is also a place that asks me to be told: a subject conceived for ten years and then left unfinished, but I owe the courage to take it up again to Trieste».