Special Campiello 2025

Special Campiello/ The finalists

An inner journey into everyday monstrosities

"Inverness", by Monica Pareschi, is a collection of short stories that aims to explore those uncomfortable, sometimes petty and even morbid feelings that form the hidden pattern of our lives

13 September 2025

3' min read

Monica Pareschi, translator of, among others, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, Willa Chater, Doris Lessing, Christopher Isherwood, Thomas Hardy, has returned to fiction ten years after her debut with Inverness (Polidoro, pp. 178, euro 15) now in the finals of the Campiello Prize

Could you describe this book?

Inverness is a collection of short stories that sets out to explore those uncomfortable, sometimes petty and even morbid feelings that form the hidden pattern of our lives. Whether it be desires that are unmentionable even to ourselves, humiliating fears or shameful aspirations, there is a weft of the unspoken that is woven into the warp that forms the deep fabric of the story of each character in these stories, and whose usually concealed reverse reveals itself by chance, or even by mistake, illuminated by flashes of consciousness triggered by that decisive moment that is the encounter with another. In addition to being a physical place, Inverness is also an inner journey through the small everyday monstrosities that say something profoundly different about us from the socially acceptable image we try to project to the outside world, they say of the evil that inhabits us and that makes us so terribly human.

Why did you feel the need to tell this story?

I am a literary translator, and I have spent many years of my life giving voice to the writing of others, that is, practising that particular form of writing that consists of rewriting in one's own language books that originate in a different idiom and culture. This involves both an obvious mimetic ability and a less obvious but indispensable authorial competence. Let us say that on this path it may happen that one feels the need to explore writing in the first person. At some point, not without hesitation and ambivalence, I decided to listen to this desire, to test myself as a writer tout court, without mediation.

How did you decide to tell the story, through what narrative and stylistic choices?

I chose to explore the form of the short story - short or long, what the Anglo-Saxons call a novella. This is for more than one reason. While it is true that some of the writers I most admire and love to read are short story authors - I am thinking of sacred monsters such as Chekhov, Gogol, Flannery O'Connor, Katherine Mansfield, Carver, but also Italians such as Federigo Tozzi or Tommaso Landolfi - there is also a very practical reason why I find this form more manageable within a professional life already dedicated to writing. I try to separate the two moments, that of translation and freelance writing, taking short 'holidays' from my daily work as a translator every now and then. You can write a good story in a fortnight, or even in a few days, and then come back to write another one even after a very long time spent doing something else; a novel sometimes takes years of constant, often daily writing. There is, however, also a formal reason why I insist on this form, which I find particularly congenial: what fascinates me about short stories is the possibility of narrating entire lives in a few pages through particularly daring stylistic solutions such as the use of time jumps and the unspoken, which also satisfies my impatience. As a writer who works a lot on the language - and much less on the plot - it is clear that the short form is my literary venue of choice.

Are you already working on your next book? If so, can you anticipate anything?

Yes, I am currently finishing a long story that should be part of a new collection, and on a kind of linguistic memoir where I explore the affective roots of my authorial language.

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