«Mamma had warned me: forget about friends, forget about travel. The world begins and ends in Triscina. We have a task: to take care of the thing in the bathroom.” With The KeeperNiccolò Ammaniti returns to a dimension that is familiar to him: adolescence as a fragile territory, crossed by forces that escape control. At the center is Nilo, a still innocent boy, immersed in an isolated universe, who grows up with a mother and an aunt who work among marbles and kitchens. When Arianna and her daughter Saskia arrive in Triscina, something goes wrong. Desire manifests itself as a destabilizing, almost petrifying experience, like the gaze of the Medusa that the Vasciaveo family has cherished for generations and hides in the bathroom at home. The novel moves like a dark fairy talebetween cruelty and tenderness, against the backdrop of an archaic and suspended Sicily.
The desire that petrifies: The Keeper is the new Niccolo Ammaniti book
We met the writer, 60 years old in September, recent winner of the Costa Smeralda Prize for Fiction.
So does love petrify?
«Not love, if anything it’s falling in love that does it. It’s that moment when we decide that someone attracts us, without really knowing why. A brief suspension, an almost indecipherable moment. We can try to explain it, but something mysterious remains, which has to do with the miracle. And perhaps for this very reason it resembles, for an instant, a form of petrification.”
Does happiness also become “petrified”?
«Yes, but because it is made up of moments. I don’t believe in continuous happiness, it would be a kind of ecstasy. However, there are precise moments in which we truly recognize it. In the book, for example, Nilo is in the car with Saskia and Arianna and he feels happiness in the air, in freedom, in the smell of salt. It’s something simple, sudden. And precisely for this reason it remains.”
Niccolò Ammaniti, one of the greatest Italian writers, achieved fame with I’m not afraid. He is also the author of TV series such as The Miracle. (photo Greta De Lazzaris)
A dark fairy tale, set in Sicily
Where does a story like this come from, between province and mythology?
«We don’t really know where the stories come from. Here everything started from the idea of petrification: imagining a hidden, guarded Medusa, capable of transforming people into statues. I was interested in that power. Then the story built itself, piece by piece, until it took shape.”
Why does petrification fascinate you so much?
«Because I love sculpture. The classic one tells the canons of beauty, the harmony of the body, of gestures. I was struck by the idea that that perfection could also be transferred to everyday, common figures. That someone, suddenly, could become like a statue.”
The cover of the new book, “Il custodia”, published by Einaudi.
The protagonist is still a child.
«Every time I try to tackle something different. In my books there is often a fracture of the idea of perfection: in I’m not afraid the image of the father is broken, in Anna a little girl becomes a mother. Here I was interested in the birth of desire, even in its most confused dimension. It’s something that just comes, that breaks the balance and makes the other necessary. Almost like an illness: it is no coincidence that Nilo’s mother compares his infatuation to a virus.”
The world of social media also enters the novel, without judgement.
«Yes, because it has now become normal. Arianna works with the OnlyFans platform because she earns more, but she could do anything else. It is a normality that is perhaps disturbing, but it is the one in which we live. I imagine these people spending their days at home, with children returning from school and content to produce: they tell stories, they film themselves, they play, they show themselves.”
Dedicated to the women in his life
The protagonists are all women and the book is dedicated to the women in his life.
«Yes, I wanted to build a female universe. Around Nilo there are many women, different from each other, and it is through them that the world is defined. The men remain in the background. Mothers, sisters, friends, are the presences with whom it comes most naturally to me to communicate.”
Are there really good and bad guys?
«There are nuances. In life, as in books, we are made of good and bad together. “Absolute villains” belong more to fantasies, even if sometimes reality manages to surprise us.”
Can literature still say something important?
«Yes, because reading is one of the few things we do alone and which at the same time connects us with others. It allows you to live lives that are not yours.”
What is your writing routine?
«I’m always suspended between the desire to write and waiting. I’m quite lazy: I write when I feel like I’m wasting time. But I also need to do nothing. Idleness, walks, music: that’s where my mind gets moving again.”