C.the are abysses of the human soul and temperatures of the times that only art can restore. A reality truer than the real one, which cannot only be referred to or explained: but which must be experienced poetically. Like this, there is all the smell of blood, latent aggression, there are the arsenals of hatred always ready for the war of our present in the new book by Andrea Tarabbia The white continent (Bollati Boringhieri).
Andrea Tarabbia (photo by Grazia Fiore / Campiello Award Foundation).
The starting point is The smell of blood, the book that Goffredo Parise wrote in the 70s and which he never completely finished. Tarabbia takes up the narrative nucleus, that of a bourgeois woman, Silvia, wife of a psychoanalyst, who, partly out of boredom and partly out of desire for life, becomes the lover of a far-right activist, and brings it to our days, making it the gateway to a fierce world of crosses, Celtic runes, subversive actions in favor of a hypothetical “white power”, but ultimately in favor of power as oppression in itself. All while keeping the narrative tension high and at the same time the discourse on literature and its creative sources.
How did the idea for this book come about?
I started writing it ten years ago, with the intention of telling the growth of the new right. I was not satisfied with the result and so I shelved the project. Until I had the idea of starting from Parise’s novel, which struck me very much. The thrust was more literary than sociological.
The literary theme, being here the narrator a writer who bears his name, is central. What is the relationship between reality and literature?
In my books I always start from a fact of history, as when I wrote about the Beslan massacre, but I ask myself the question every time: can I really enter into something that has touched the pain of others? In this book I try to give myself the answer, that is, I take the responsibility to write, and then I try to do it in the best possible way in terms of literature.
This novel is incredibly current.
I don’t believe in prophetic books, but there are things that can only be expressed through artistic creation. Heidegger at the end of his life left the arguments for the poems. It is the power of art: to express reality with more powerful metaphors. In this case I have used the book of Parise (and others) as a source, instead of newspapers or documents, and it is amazing how it still expresses something we live.
“The white continent” by Andrea Tarabbia (Bollati Bordigheri).
That is, the smell of blood?
Yes. Just think of what has happened in recent times in terms of violence and we see that there are many news stories that would be quietly within the “white continent”, a right-wing formation that I imagine in the book, led by Marcello Croce, l ‘lover of Silvia, which includes thugs, fanatics, politicians and blood theorists who live as if they were at war, between violence and free executions. I am not saying that this is our situation, but there are signs.
For example?
In the book, the honorable Malaspina gives a speech taken at times from words by Pino Rauti from 1949. So to say that Italy was actually a fascist country was condemnable, today it can be said on a talk show.
A sentence from the book: “A war is coming, which side are you on?”.
War language has long since come into use. There is talk of eradicating the virus, fighting inflation, defeating unemployment, arming oneself for the winter. A constant militarization, a finger-pointing at the enemies. As a writer and observer of language I can say that this gradually transforms us, makes war and violence a daily and welcomed thing.
Many animals return to the book. Men and animals more and more alike?
I often use metaphors with animals, in this case with the meaning of returning to an impulsive state of nature: if I have a need, I want to satisfy it immediately and I don’t care about others.
Yet, Marcello the thug makes Silvia, a middle-class woman, fall in love with him. What is the charm of her?
There is boredom, there is the fascination of self-destruction that leads to ruin, there is the fascination of seeing someone behave in a subversive way as a certain type of bourgeoisie desires and never has the courage to do. I took the character of Silvia from Parise, but the situation hasn’t changed since the 1970s, quite the contrary.
The story is introduced by her husband, the psychoanalyst. The theme of psychic pathology also returns.
It is the portrait of a nation and the way we are living, as if in a mist.
And why the white color of the title and not the black?
White is the color of purity. Not of innocent purity: of purity against those who are not considered pure. And it is also the color of blindness as you described it in the novel of the same name Saramago. It is not a nihilism that moves these violent fringes, young people who have not even known historical fascism, it is blindness.
A hopeful ending?
There are more endings in the book, the desirable one is the child playing, the radical innocence that takes away all that has been done wrong.
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