Lthe first part of Tasmania, Paolo Giordano’s latest book released in 2022, is titled “In Case of Apocalypse” and is extremely topical, as is the entire novel. As we say to each other during our chat in a Roman bar, in these weeks of great concern for the wars around us «the anguish undergoes a continuous refresh on the screen». In fact, every time we update a news site and focus on foreign affairs, we read some news that disturbs us. A wave of negativity that is difficult to escape and which, due to its public and private effects, takes us back a few years. At the time, precisely, of Tasmania.
Paolo Giordano is 40 years old and is widely followed not only for his booksi (with The solitude of prime numbers won the Strega at 26 years old), but also for the articles on Corriere della Sera who accompanied us during Covid, the invasion of Ukraine and now help us reflect on the dramatic crisis in the Middle East. Pages in which, with the precision of a scientist and the sensitivity of a humanist, he focuses on the uncertainties, the anxieties, the paradigm shifts of his generation but also of those that precede and follow him.
Time for writing and time for reality: how are they reconciled, especially when working on a book?
A novel lives on a hypothesis of continuity of the world, of coherence of tomorrow with respect to today. But if the reference parameters fall apart, as I think has happened, how do you keep the structure of a book together? Tasmania It has a rubble shape.
Don’t you think instead that it has continuity and coherence, and the gamble has been won?
In reality I had a stop during the writing. I wrote the first part before the invasion of Ukraine, during the tail end of the pandemic. In that period the feeling was one of calm, of relief at having survived. Then halfway through the book, in February 2022, after the Russian invasion, I got stuck. For a month I couldn’t write anything. Until I said to myself: if I want to finish it I have to live in the time of the novel, which is not in sync with that of the present, and distance myself from reality. In fact, what we are experiencing does not allow us to conceive anything long or extensive.
Isn’t this a generational issue?
Ultimately it is one of the dramas underlying precariousness, flexibility. But the more generational aspect is the derivative in which we Millennials find ourselves. We are children of a generation that has moved forward for decades according to a positive derivative, that is, a growing curve of hopes, expectations, ideas of well-being, civilization and democracy. We grew up within this idea, but then we found ourselves living, as adults, in a negative derivative. Generation Z kids haven’t even had our imprinting, and I don’t know if this makes them more fragile or freer. Perhaps more fragile. We Millennials have experienced the change of sign from all points of view: economic, of civil rights which seemed to have to expand indefinitely when I was 18, of democracy which should have been contagious everywhere, but instead look where we are.
Do you believe that today it is impossible to imagine a long-term horizon?
Today you don’t know if what you write will last until tomorrow morning. Since the years of terrorism, I would say since the assault on the Bataclan in 2015, it has been a succession of great discontinuities. This morning I wanted to go to court, to the hearing of the Last Generation kids who had defaced the Senate, but then I got to work on Israel and Gaza. The climate crisis always ends up being overshadowed by something more urgent, while the truth is that crises come at different speeds. The environmental one will make us pay one of the highest prices. Only, it’s distilled differently. And here too there is a fact of the present with a generational aspect.
Which?
Today, to be in the world in a conscious way you need to know many things, many more than what was important to know thirty years ago. Just think of technology, which brings us closer to distant reality. For me, the constant feeling is the impossibility of control. My parents, like many of their generation, had a strong illusion of holding the reins of their own existence. We Millennials have lost it. In Devour the sky I was trying to reflect on this, and in the end I used the word “amphibian” to define ourselves, in the sense of a double belonging. We were formed in one world and live in another, while Boomers and Gen Z have always remained in the same one. It seems to me that a strong break has occurred in the last 20 years.
Despite the looming sense of the Apocalypse, you yourself ultimately observe that things pass by, they slip by us. Is it a healthy survival instinct?
I’m thinking about it a lot, from the Bataclan onwards. This is inertia, which has a double value. On the one hand, it is a force that continues to drag you forward, on the other it is a form of impassivity. We do these continuous refreshes to stay up to date and at the same time we quickly lose emotional attachment. I think it’s a form of defense, you can’t always be intensely involved in what happens. The cycles are increasingly rapid, the wars in Ukraine and Israel come crashing down on us, but then they become background noise. We have already seen it with Covid, completely reabsorbed as if nothing had happened. Yet only three years have passed, not 30.
At the end of the book he says: I write about everything that made me cry. What does it mean?
Emotion remains for me the most reliable indicator, the compass for thinking about telling something. If I am not guided by this principle, everything seems indifferent to me. I don’t distrust emotion, while I distrust emotion. Emotion puts you in contact with others, with the world, it gives you a foothold. It’s not a between-you thing like emotion. Which is much more unreliable, and is the one on which the information relies, even the one that should be more rigorous.
Let’s return to the topic of precariousness: in your opinion is it generational?
I have always found it natural to talk about the phases of life I was in. My characters are about the age I was when I described them. Tasmania it is a reconnaissance of the 40s, an age that is a bit of a center in which all the potential is piled up and which, yes, experiences precariousness.
If instead he had to rewrite The solitude of prime numberswhat would change in Mattia and Alice?
I don’t know if that extreme introversion is a legible trait today. I would wonder if Mattia and Alice shouldn’t be more brazen. And maybe I would start from technology, which isn’t there.
Paolo Giordano, do you feel comfortable in your 40s?
I find them very comfortable, unlike the previous ages. I feel in a bubble. Those traces of paternalism that they attributed to me until a few years ago have disappeared.
But he enters a phase of life in which he must behave “in a certain way”.
I have always behaved in a certain way, never in another way. More than well educated, I was hyper polite. Instead, I hope from here on out to have the freedom not to please everyone.
In his first interview, in 2008, he said he hadn’t slept the previous night due to agitation. How do you learn to live with popularity?
I have only recently learned to have a certain looseness, to avoid tension for hours before appearing on TV. Little by little I understood that all in all the world wasn’t falling apart. However, there are still forms of exposure that are not natural for me. Instagram, for example, is very unnatural.
But she became popular already at 26, when she won the Strega.
The popularity of the writing is one thing, the exposure of the person is another. But, book after book, I gradually began to feel more confident. Even in this I find the 40 more comfortable; I no longer have performance anxiety, which for me has always been a theme and perhaps is generational.
Don’t you think it’s more of a problem for Gen Z?
For us it was something we had to fight and learn to manage. In them it is aggravated, it is a neoliberal theme. Now it’s an element of oppression, I don’t envy them.
What then do you envy, and reproach, Gen Z and Boomers?
I don’t reproach young people for anything. I envy a little cheek, if I had had it it would have been better. On the other hand, I blame the Boomers for their attachment to power, and also for a certain rigidity towards the cultural paradigms that are changing.
How would you define Millennials in three words?
Amphibians, competent, cold.
The event that changed your life?
There are two: writing The solitude of prime numbers and meet my wife.
What is love?
An ongoing thing, a 360° complicity, a lot of time together. I was a champion of loneliness, now I can’t stand it anymore. I want to spend as much time as possible with my wife. A long, unfinalized time in which we can be creative together.
Who inspired you in life?
David Forster Wallace, one of my sources for writing, and a musician, PJ Harvey, for the freedom, uniqueness, creativity, spirituality that she has maintained in a 30-year career.
What wouldn’t you give up?
To the music.
As a boy he played the guitar, then he moved on to writing when…
when I realized I was mediocre. The ambition to write was already there, but I was intimidated. I waited until I had to fill a void – the one left by music – to throw myself into it.
She has a doctorate in physics. What has science left you?
The passion for a specific language, an analytical and phenomenological approach. I am interested in the description of what happens and the way in which scientific language proceeds, with sentences that say things one at a time, concatenated. I like tortuous language but it’s not mine.
What do you do when you’re not writing? Do you still play the guitar?
Never. Since I stopped I haven’t taken it again. I cook, I walk, I read a lot. And I tidy up. I’m not a tidy man, I rather like action, being able to organize space. Give me a very messy room, I’ll tidy it up for you. Believe me, I’m really good at it.
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