Noadia Newfoundland doesn’t need much introduction. He begins with The years in reversewith Goodbye ghosts he is a finalist for the 2019 Strega award. In 2022 he publishes The night tremblesa great success. She is also the author of many children’s books, I’ll mention one: The secret. An authentic jewel. Arrive now at the bookstore with What I know about you (Guanda), a novel of overwhelming strength. The theme is that of madness. Venera, the narrator’s great-grandmother, spent some time in a mental hospital and the writer has never met her, but has dreamed of her for years. She comes to her as if called to tell her her tragic story as a woman. But she won’t be the only one crazy about this Messina “family mythology”.
Family mythology in the new book by Nadia Terranova
And this is the beauty of the novel, a prism that rotates and in which whoever is reflected in it subsumes a bit of the madness of the world. A puzzle book, where if in one piece someone suffers, it’s because in another there is someone who achieves unheard of joys. In short, for us readers a cloak book that will protect us from madness and the loss of love.
«Venera is a character we will not forget. She gives more than one version”.
«Within family stories it is often difficult to establish certainties because they come from decades of omissions, falsifications and forgetfulness, more or less innocent, and then the truth is the one you put together by reconstructing the pieces and then tell yourself to survive. In my case I found documents that denied years of legends that were orally true, almost as if they were fairy tales for posterity.”
A prism of madness
The women of his family are imbued with magic and reticence. Can you tell us about them?
«My grandmother was a sort of secular saint, she had a mystical relationship with religion, she was not afraid of sacrifice and never forgot to pray to her dead, her ancestors, her husband and above all her daughter who had died very young, a laceration atrocious. His mother had been committed to a mental hospital for a serious form of depression, and her story is the one that takes up the most space in the book, when I deal with this matrilineal thread. She was in turn the daughter of a woman with witchy features, a nineteenth-century embroiderer who had been unable to have children for a long time. And then there is my mother, who chose to ignore the magical aspect of our family, and my daughter, who is instead a little fairy.”
Nadia Terranova is the author of the book “What I know about you” (Photo by Leonardo Cendamo/Getty Images)
Extraordinary male figures
There is no shortage of extraordinary male figures. From the vilified grenadier great-grandfather, to the narrator’s father and the mother’s second husband. Can it be said that here patriarchy and matriarchy merge?
«The balance of power of southern families has unclear shadows and nuances. The fathers in my story sometimes get lost, they often make mistakes and induce tenderness, they are basically good figures, but terrible underground emotional blackmail can also be built on that tenderness, very strong social pressures with respect to the roles, to the archetypes of masculine and feminine that society identifies as such in a way that can nail and suffocate.
There is not only one truth
Madness is a strong theme. But there isn’t just one. And the narrated voice (hers) fears and challenges her. «Pirandello reminds us that there is not only one truth and that this awareness can lead to loneliness and madness. I am very influenced by the lesson of the Greeks, usually in the classical world those who know the truth lose their sight: you need darkness to see, fortune tellers are blind. This book immerses itself in darkness, so that while I was writing it I felt that the stories I had always known changed shape under my fingers, other lights illuminated the truths I had inherited from family legends.”
The cover of the writer’s new book
Motherhood against the evils of the world
We talk a lot about motherhood. But here it is turned into a powerful weapon against the evils of the world. What is being a mother like for you?
«An experience of incredible, ancestral, primordial strength. An upheaval that occupies every part of the body and has given me new lenses, which have changed my life and my writing. I am grateful to my daughter, a joyful, curious little girl, for the joy she brings me every day in crossing the world together, and for the questions that her presence leads me to ask on an ethical and existential level. She arrived when I was forty, a moment in which I thought I had already achieved some certainties, but instead she crumbles them and brings me new questions.”
The man who knew how to love
There is also another male figure of great importance. I would define her as the man who knew how to love. Who should you have children with?
«With good, and possibly intelligent, men. You can disagree, you can discuss, even argue, but if you have respect and trust, relationships hold up and fatherhood is another great adventure to observe and talk about.”
Writing for Nadia Terranova as exorcism
His novel encourages meditation even when surrounded by fireworks. Is this how he averted his madness and that of his readers?
«The Neapolitan writer Fabrizia Ramondino, at a certain point in her life, spent a period of time in the Women’s Mental Health Center in Trieste, to tell the stories of the patients. Perhaps he also did it to exorcise his imbalances, and he made a very beautiful book out of it which I consulted while I was writing. And maybe yes, I was also looking for my own path, which is always looking words in the eyes, even the hardest ones, and never running away from living them in my own way.
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