People without history, who made history

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

I worked a lot in the archival research phase. In a certain way, the writing proceeded while deepening the research among the folders of the archives. The work of the historian and the work of the narrator sometimes walked in parallel, at other times I had to choose which of the two ways of framing a story best suited my intentions. In the end, the narrator's choice prevailed. So I tried to tension the story through different planes of conflict, because a story works well if there is a conflict to tell. Here there was ideological, class and linguistic conflict. As a storyteller, I use language to tell the other two planes of conflict. And I tension high and low, comedy and tragedy, humour and drama, to hold together a story without strong characters. Mine is deliberately a choral story of minute people. There are no great leaders, big charismatic males or romantic figures with whom the reader must identify. There are the little people, the little ants who make the tiny story. Moreover, in contrast to my earlier production and the bulk of what goes to press today, there are no emotions with which to win over and convince the reader: mine is a mining story, of people who do not allow themselves the luxury of telling their intimacies. There are facts, raw and naked, sweat and blood, but no emotions. It is a very precise stylistic choice. Finally, the perspective of the writer: I was tired of narrating in the first person, even though autobiography (but mine was perhaps more of an auto-socio-biography) is perhaps the most relevant narrative choice in recent years. Instead, I now move away from the first person. Nor do I choose the position of the omniscient narrator of the naturalist novel of the past or the bourgeois historical novel. I therefore entrust the narration to two vicarious narrators, belonging to two opposing political camps, a carabiniere and a socialist. But they are two unreliable narrators and they complicate things instead of telling them as they should be told. That's why I occasionally have to have them beaten up by some secondary character. And it is precisely the secondary characters with whom I identify most, as an author.

Are you already working on a next book? If so, can you anticipate something?

Actually, when I received the news that I was in the Campiello shortlist, I was working on a new translation from Spanish. By now, after a decade of working in publishing, which is a low-income, low-prestige sector, I am working in publishing, which is a low-income, high-prestige sector. So I was translating an Argentinian novel but I slowed down a lot in translation because of the commitments of the Campiello presentation tour. And in the last few months I have put my writing aside. Of course I have some material in the drawer. An old draft of a travel report from India, then two separate ideas to develop for a novel project. Then an old novel that I would like to rewrite because I consider it as unhappy as I gave it to print so many years ago. And above all, a series of short stories on the theme of work to be organised, which I have been putting aside for decades. Unfortunately, short fiction is little appreciated in Italy but I adore it. In short, the drawer is full of dust and ideas. You have to find the time to get to grips with it: remove the dust and scratch the ideas with a file, so that they sparkle.