She, “Liberata”, sees the invisible: interview with Domenico Dara

John

By John

You have to read Domenico Dara. Its delicate and powerful figure are indispensable, his stories are always full of small worlds and enormous emotions, woven with moving and never intrusive literary knowledge and who live there for a long time, crowding us with questions but also giving us that loving calm that great, beautiful books inspire.

And, whatever they tell, they always underlie the love for the word, for pure narration but never separated from what preceded us, as if every novel were a piece of an invisible mosaic (and this too is a key word, for the his characters). «Freed» (Feltrinelli) is the latest novel by Domenico Dara (after the award-winning «Short treatise on coincidences», Nutrimenti, 2014, Beat, 2016; «Notes of celestial mechanics», Nutrimenti, 2016 and «Mal winter», 2020, Feltrinelli), the most particular of the Calabrian writers: even if his stature is independent of places and locations, we find his belonging expressed in many ways, starting from the very tasty choice of names, which are the “heaviest” and most significant words among those that a narrator chooses to found his worlds.

Liberata Macrì is a very young typist passionate about photo novels who lives in a small town in Calabria in the years of the “strategy of tension” and the bloodiest political struggle: vanished worlds, that of typists, photo novels, newsstands – where even the knowledge, with the famous, very popular encyclopedias in sections – as living centers of the community. A small village where the arrival of the “foreigner” is always upsetting, while History always arrives as a distant echo. And Liberata will have to deal with the new that advances, with the stranger that presents itself, dazzling like love, with bonds, and their way of persisting and changing, with family and community. She has a very special talent for “filtering” everything through the photo stories she collects and collects (and the polaroids she takes and keeps, just as many stories that are composed through shots, moments taken away from time and stopped): but perhaps we don’t all do that, with our private codes and systems and languages? We talked about it with the author, who is about to embark on a tour of Sicily: it will be Thursday 10th in Modica (Auditorium Piazza Matteotti, at 7.30pm, with Chiara Scucces), Friday 11th in Catania (at 6.30pm Feltrinelli bookshop via Etnea with Lorena Spampinato) , Saturday 12th in Messina at 6pm (Feltrinelli bookshop, with the writer).

There is so much that is invisible in your story, which yet seems so concrete and prosaic, within the very small community of a southern village, where the whiffs of great history arrive muffled and distant, with small and everyday protagonists: girls who read photo novels , Beguines who attend church, the sleepy life of the village where every stranger is a thrill of novelty. But it is all plotted by that invisible, or by the infinitesimal that escapes the eyes: magical thinking, imagination, premonitions and symbols that speak to us, act on us. As in Malinterno, there is an invisible writing that moves us, and we don’t know it…

«The characters in my books are often confronted with what cannot be seen: life does not always offer the answers we seek in a linear and evident way and so we have to resort to other strategies. There is something else, beyond what we see, something else that does not necessarily coincide with a divinity: something that from time to time my characters identify with Destiny, Chance, Nature, Celestial Mechanics, Quantum Physics ; something mysterious, bigger than us that somehow determines and directs our existences. Liberata is deeply convinced of this, which is why she goes in search of signs, clues, traces that allow her to draw a kind of existential map to orient herself in the tangle of possibilities and choices. I like to think, like all the characters in my stories, that there is something we don’t see, be it the infinitely large or the infinitely small.”

Liberata is bold in fantasy but fearful in reality: she is part of the fascinating series of heroines who live splendors in the imagination and are awkward creatures in everyday life, but she also reminds us of how we have been, many and many, in a phase of life. The one in which we believed in the power of our imagination more than in what we saw. There is a great strength in Liberata, and perhaps we should see this strength more often, and recognize it in people and places where we do not expect it (in this sense your Calabria is exemplary: it is full of hidden, karst energies , unsuspected)?

«A distinctive trait of my characters, and therefore also of Liberata, is a continuous split between imagination and reality. In them this dichotomy is accentuated, brought almost to the limits of paroxysm, but I still think it is a conflict that affects everyone, without distinction: often our existence, if we pay attention to it, is continually aimed at finding a stable balance between who we are and who we would like to be. In light of this polarization, we have the duty to ensure that our potential can be realized to direct lives towards what we desire. It is a wish that I also wish for my region and, with it, for all the regions that have allowed themselves to be deceived by false models: to recover their authenticity and begin a revolutionary path of re-appropriation. But to travel a road, you need to know where to go. Well, I have the feeling that those who have governed and continue to govern Calabria not only don’t know where to go, but even continue to take the wrong path. Making this land, for example, an energy hub – which means, in short, violating and disfiguring its natural beauty to plant wind turbines in every corner of land and sea – seems to me to be the final blow dealt to an already dying body ».

In literature, as in photo novels, «everything flows. The connections work, the stories that begin end, nothing remains suspended.” And your novels are wonderfully literary: the play of connections, references, resonances is very fine, starting from the names, which are just as many maps (even in Malinterno there was precise, rigorous work on names). But choose a form that – despite being nourished by a lexicon that here and there reveals shining preciousness – seems simple: yet it is not an ambush on the reader, rather an invitation to play together. You are a narrator who loves the reader, and involves him on many levels of provocation and alliance. What is your idea of ​​literature, here and now?

«Every element that enters a story, even the seemingly least important detail, must have some meaning or function. In the end everything holds together, like a building in which even the smallest brick is essential to its maintenance. In this search for stability, language plays an indispensable role, a language that is modeled from time to time on the story it tells: in Malinterno, which was a book about books, the language was very literary and refined; in Liberata, where the protagonists are photo novels, the language instead had to be simple, everyday, linear, but without descending into banality, and I hope that the reader grasps and appreciates this effort. In literature there is everything and the opposite of everything. I think this is its great strength: in it everyone can find what they need. I have found a new life there.”

After all, Liberata filters everything through the scenes of his photo novels, tries to read the world through them. But isn’t that what we do with books that speak to us (and as a narrator you continually remind us of their weight and delight)?

«Helping us read the world is one of the many things that books should do. Ultimately, the “Mal winter syndrome” consists of this, interpreting the world by projecting onto it the charm and suggestions of the readings. Liberata also does it with photo novels: the Polaroids she takes and orders in an album are a way of creating a photo novel of her own life, of breaking down boundaries and becoming the heroine of a plot she is writing herself. I think this is the greatest gift that books have given me: living my life as if it were a story being written, and looking around with the curiosity to know where the days will lead me which, like pages, I leaf through day after day. day”.

All three Macrìs, Liberata and her parents, are “collectors”: their collections (Liberata’s photos, her mechanic-entomologist father’s insects, even her mother’s illustrated doilies) summarize the world, as if each were attempting their own language, its potential narrative (you have always been tempted by the catalogue, by the vertigo of the list). As you do, writer (and this time the “micro-collection” you propose is all in the titles of the photo novels for each chapter). Are we all looking for a language that organizes the world for us, and do we ask artists for it?

«The true collector, after all, would never want to finish his collection. It might seem like a paradox, but the meaning of what he does lies precisely in the search for the missing and unobtainable piece. The collector is above all an orderer of worlds, a bringer of cosmos in chaos, who probably deludes himself, in his self-referential game, into putting his own life in order. At a certain point in the novel, Liberata thinks that when we are confused and feel foreign to life it is perhaps because we simply use the wrong language, which does not belong to us, that then the only solution is knowing how to invent an alphabet. Everyone must build their own interpretative apparatus based on what they possess. Liberata’s code, for example, is different from that of Mal winter or the postman of the Brief Treatise, and yet all three are united by the desire to make the world and its mystery more intelligible. If the question we ask ourselves is the same for everyone – why we exist in the world – the answers depend on the own and personal language that everyone chooses”.

Ultimately, yours is also a great declaration of love to a world that has now disappeared: that of files, encyclopedias, photo novels. Dissemination and fiction that could be bought on newsstands (in Liberata’s little world the newsstand is a lively center of sociality) and entered every home. A “small world” that also tried to project itself far away. You often talk about “small worlds”, but to reveal to us their unlimited intimate scope. Is it still like this: will small worlds save us?

«I owe much of my vocation as a writer to the newsstand: I grew up in a small town in the South, which was a small paradise on earth, a distributor of stories and dreams: photo novels, precisely; the first issues of the issues I bought, only those, because they were on offer; the first releases of book series; the unsold newspapers that were given to me and which were worth an entire library. Soon the newsstands will no longer be there, just as there will be no handwritten letters or the small circuses that toured the towns: a world we have known is on the verge of dissolving, and probably rightly so because progress is a continuous cycle of life and death. I don’t think that these small worlds will save us, by training and feeling I am a fatalist who believes little in the concept of salvation, but I nevertheless maintain a predilection for things that disappear, for what has been and is not, for everything that is transitory and fleeting. Like any human activity. Like man.”