«NoIt’s not the years that count in life, it’s the life you put into those years» said Abraham Lincoln. Thus the author from Cagliari Matteo Porru, enfant prodige of writing since the age of 15now twenty-one, writes with Pain creates winter (Garzanti) – his fourth novel – already a book of maturity. The story brings us into a great existential metaphor of oblivion and reckoning of memory, narrated with a lyrical and expressionist attitude, like other very young people in literature ever.
Matteo Porru is 21 years old and lives between Cagliari and Venice where he studies philosophy. He won the Campiello Giovani award in 2019 at the age of just 18 with the story Talismani and is considered one of the twenty-five most promising under 25s in Italy. Photo by Chiara Pasqualini
The role of snow
We are in the far north of Russia, near the Arctic Circle, next to the city of Vorkuta, infamous for the repression of the gulags. The absolute protagonist is the snow that submerges the lives of disoriented inhabitants, invaded and corroded by the silence and whiteness that isolates thoughts and condemns them to apathy. Elia Legasov is the youngest in a family of snow blowers on deserted roads, and he has the task of bringing afloat what is submerged. Suddenly a shipment of foreigners breaks the stalemate and causes what hasn’t changed for years to change forever.
What made you turn to writing at such a young age?
The fact that I had a very different world from that of my peers due to a serious illness, a form of soft tissue cancer, which started when I was three years old and which later brought about various collateral problems.
Has pain nourished creativity, as often happens in the West?
I’d say that pain creates the space and intensity for which you are led to dialogue with places deep within you from which creativity can spring. I started writing short stories, I gave them away on the street, one day they ended up in the hands of a publisher and it all started.
After Campiello young with TalismansHow did this story come about?
In Sardinia, where I live, snow is rare. In my memory there are two images that I keep sharp. The first time I saw snow I was in elementary school and I remember its silence perfectly. In the midst of the noise of those expressing their astonishment, the snow was just falling. And Dante’s verses on Count Ugolino that tell the heart of hell in the throes of ice. But how? I was an altar boy and hell was made of flames. I wrote this story to try to understand the sound of snow and its hellish dimension. The setting is an imaginary Russia, but linked, as in all my books, to a historical event, which in this case is the Vorkuta massacre.
Pain creates winter by Matteo Porru, Garzanti160 pages, €16
Right from the title, the atmosphere seems highly symbolic. Tell us about it?
Of the title, Pain creates winter, the most important word is “create”. It narrates the snow’s ability to stratify, to cover, to lead to inaction. This is life in Jievnibirsk and this is the existential condition of the protagonist Elia Legasov. He doesn’t want to remember, let the memory be muffled and frozen. And all the other inhabitants are trapped with him.
Can you introduce us to these characters?
There is precisely Elia the snowplow, Matvej the owner of the inn, Boris the great friend of Elia, to whom he has promised protection but which he will not be able to save from himself. Their life falls and exists. So does the snow too. The days are marked by teleshopping, monotony, cancellation. Then comes Andrej, the foreigner. The “black days” begin with him, that is the semester in which the sun never rises, but paradoxically they will be the days of the unveiling of the past that was buried.
Out of metaphor, how does he talk about her and about us?
It took me seven years to write this novel, it was the time of my “unfreezing”. It was my memory that didn’t want to lift what covered the memory of pain and illness. But what we hide lies in wait and sooner or later asks to be seen, welcomed and healed. This was writing Elijah’s story for me: the way out of the manipulation of memories.
In all of this, how do you live your 21 years?
For everything I’ve been through, I’m already old. Lincoln’s words are my story.
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