G.yellow? Too easy. Gianrico Carofiglio has accustomed us to reading on several floors, where on the base story, let’s call it that, digressions are grafted that involve us, revealing psychological shortcuts and tics that we even unwittingly put into practice. So, if you explain that its protagonist Penelope found in retrospect good reasons for making a mistakeit is impossible not to think that that kind of self-absolving mechanism concerns us, and a lot.
Gianrico Carofiglio photo by Claudio Sforza
The second novel starring the investigator Penelope Spada, the character appears more mature, willing to face his demons and let them go. A former magistrate (like her literary father), Penelope left her profession and plunged into a self-destructive maelstrom for a guilt that will be revealed in this new chapter: trying to find out if the death of a wealthy doctor (and Freemason) is natural or attributable to the young and beautiful wife will finally be able to open up and come to terms with the past. A story of guilt and redemption, and a reflection on the saving power of words, those that finally spring to reveal their truth.
Penelope Spada, a woman told by a man
The protagonist is “a woman told by a man’s keyboard” specifies Carofiglioas if to sanction a bet. So he built a female character who speaks in the first person: wasn’t he afraid of misinterpreting? To fall into the stereotype?
Hemingway used to say that the fundamental quality of a good writer is to have a “shit detector” always in action (an alarm bell for m …, ed), which warns you when you are saying something trivial. My doorbell seems to work, it being understood that I am still exposed to the risk of expressing mediocre things. But in writing, and in rewriting, I always ask myself if something is trivial, a cliché, or said to avoid the duty to tell the truth (of the character of course, not of real events). Here the risk was very heavy, I alerted all the control mechanisms. Penelope is a female character with masculine traits. So far, those who have read it have found themselves there.
Grudge by Gianrico Carofiglio, Einaudi, pp. 238, € 18.50.
The female emotions are actually all there, starting with the sense of guilt on which Penelope’s showdown with the past rests: she investigates a mystery that has its roots in a story of five years earlier and that concerns her. A kind of rendezvous with destiny: do you believe in appointments with destiny?
Yes, but I don’t believe in an invisible hand. The appointment with destiny means having your eyes ready to see things that sooner or later happen. Penelope opens her eyes, and finally comes to terms with her torment. She manages to tell it, her redemption takes place, both in the structure of the novel and in the psychology of the character, in the reconstruction of her guilt for how painful and irreparable she is, since she has destroyed everything she had studied for and dreamed.
You write that we often evaluate certain behaviors of ours by citing the reasons, always excellent, for which we committed them …
It belongs to everyone and we are all aware of this manipulation. We are inclined to make choices that depend on various factors but which often do not depend on good reasons. Then we find the words to justify them, to make them coherent with the image of ourselves that we want to keep. Actions are often dissonant between who we think we are and who we really are, so we need adjustments. At a certain point, the build-up has to be faced, which Penelope does, mercilessly facing her own guilt and herself.
His are legal thrillers, they call it the Italian Grisham. Is it difficult to bend the “cold” law to narrative needs?
Just don’t fold it. Sometimes, it also happens in good quality stories, procedures are bent in a functional way, but credibility is lost, the story is less realistic. The world of law, the stories of the Courts, have enormous narrative potential. It is a theater of life that includes comedy, tragedy, confrontation, metaphor: to get the story out you need to know how the mechanism works.
There are recurring themes in the novel, such as listening in good investigation …
Yes, it is a theme that I also like to treat in a somewhat didactic way to explain what delicate mechanism an investigation is if interpreted in the right way. It requires many qualities, the first being empathy. Those with it are able to enter into relationships with even the worst criminals without this meaning justifying them. Empathy is a prerequisite for obtaining everything that can be achieved ethically, without manipulating. Of course it depends on the type of investigation, but in the classic one, like a detective book, therefore on an unsolved mystery closed in someone’s memory you need to have a key and this key is empathy.
What is alexithymia and why does Penelope think she has it?
It’s the inability to feel emotions, but Penelope mostly tries to numb them. In the book she remembers the gimmick of her therapist asking her: “So you are afraid of not feeling emotions? But fear is an emotion so it is not true that she has no emotions, perhaps she is not able to tell them “.
A syllogism …
It is one of the themes I like to play with, the strategic use of words, a therapeutic stratagem towards oneself and towards others to bring out the contradictions, the deceptions of interiority, bring them to the surface and try to solve them.
Eventually Penelope finds out about the killer, but it’s been a while since the facts, so she wonders what to do, probably let him go. But the rules, she writes, are the salvation from arbitrariness. Because?
The rules legitimize the way we are, they give the idea of our ethical dimension, of what we can do. In the past, Penelope made them herself, and for good reasons: her fault is precisely linked to this. But the rules make sense even if at times they hinder and annoy substantial justice.
Could the rancor, which gives the book its title, be such a ferocious motivation as to lead to murder?
I was a prosecutor, I know that the causes of crimes are often frighteningly disproportionate to the effects. But you need to know this because if you believe that a catastrophic outcome must correspond to an adequate cause, you won’t understand how people act: most of the time by chance.
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