I used to think that making things up, rather than drawing directly on reality, would give me more creative autonomy. I preferred to manipulate the truth, but I also wanted to represent it faithfully, authentically. Verisimilitude was very important to me, as a writer. After writing this book I changed my mind.
Invention can also be a trap. A character fabricated out of nothing has to seem like a real person — there’s the challenge. It was a challenge, especially in The Lowland, to portray a real place where I have never lived, and to evoke a historical era that I didn’t know. I did a lot of research to make that world, that time, believable. Beginning with my first book I evoked Calcutta, my parents’ native city. Because it was, for them, a far-off place that had almost disappeared, I was looking for a way, through writing, to bridge the distance, and to make it present.
Today I no longer feel bound to restore a lost country to my parents. It took me a long time to accept that my writing did not have to assume that responsibility. In that sense In Other Words is the first book I’ve written as an adult, but also, from the linguistic point of view, as a child.
I continue, as a writer, to seek the truth, but I don’t give the same weight to factual truth. In Italian I’m moving toward abstraction. The places are undefined, the characters so far are nameless, without a particular cultural identity. The result, I think, is writing that is freed in certain ways from the concrete world. I now construct a less specific setting. That’s why I understand Matisse, when he compared his new technique to the experience of flight. Writing in Italian, I feel that my feet are no longer on the ground.
What drove me to take a new direction, toward writing that is both more autobiographical and more abstract? It’s a contradiction in terms, I realize. Where does the more personal perspective originate, along with a vaguer tonality? It must be the language. In this book language is not only the tool but the subject. Italian remains the mask, the filter, the outlet, the means. The detachment without which I can’t create anything. And it’s this new detachment that helps me show my face.
I have an ambivalent relationship with this book, and probably always will. On the one hand I’m proud of it. I traveled far to get here. I earned every word: nothing about it was handed down. Everything derives from my determination. It was a risky procedure. That I was able to conceive, draft, prepare the pages for publication seems a miracle. I consider it an authentic book, because it’s sincere, honest.
On the other hand I fear that it’s a false book. I’m insecure about it, a little embarrassed. Although it now has a cover, a binding, a physical presence, I’m afraid it’s frivolous, even presumptuous. I don’t know if continuing to write in Italian is the right path. My Italian remains a work in progress, and I remain a foreigner. I came to Italy partly to know my characters better, my parents. I didn’t expect to become a foreigner as a writer, too.
It’s interesting, now that the book is about to come out, to hear some of the reactions. When I say that my new book is written in Italian, I am often regarded, mainly by other writers, with suspicion, almost with disapproval. Maybe I’m wrong; I wonder if it will be considered a dead end, or, at best, “a pleasant distraction.” Some say to me that a writer should never abandon his or her dominant language for one that is known only superficially. They say that the disadvantages serve neither writer nor reader. When I hear these opinions I’m ashamed, and I have the impulse to erase every word.
It was only after writing this book that I discovered Ágota Kristóf, an author of Hungarian origin who wrote in French. Maybe it was best that I didn’t know her voice and her works before — to have taken this step unaware of her example. I read, first of all, a brief autobiographical text, The Illiterate, in which she talks about her literary education and the experience of arriving in Switzerland, at twenty-one, as a refugee. She begins to learn French, a hard, demanding process. She writes:
It’s here that my struggle to conquer this language begins, a long, relentless struggle, which will certainly last for my whole life. I’ve spoken French for more than thirty years, I’ve written it for twenty, but I still don’t know it. I can’t speak it without mistakes, and I can write it only with the help of a dictionary that I consult frequently.
Reading this passage, I was both stunned and comforted. They could have been my sentiments, my words.
Then I read, unable to put it down, her celebrated trilogy of novels, beginning with The Notebook, which the author considered an autobiographical work, and which I find an absolute masterpiece. I was even more captivated by the lapidary, purified, incisive quality of her writing. The effect is overwhelming, as powerful as a punch in the stomach. Although I read Kristóf in Italian, I can perceive, even in translation, the effort implicit in the writing. I intuit the linguistic mask in which she, like me, finds herself constrained and at the same time free. Knowing her work, I feel reassured, less alone. I think I’ve met a guide, maybe even a companion, on this path.
And yet there remains a fundamental difference between her and me. Ágota Kristóf was forced to abandon Hungarian. She wrote in French because she wanted to be read. “It became a necessity,” the author explains. She regretted not being able to write in her native language, and so she always considered French “the enemy language.” I, on the other hand, choose willingly to write in Italian. I don’t miss English, not even the superior control it gives me.
Kristóf’s work brings into focus the fact that an autobiographical novel is not always what it seems, and that the boundary between imagination and reality is blurred. The protagonist of The Third Lie, the third volume of the trilogy, says: “I try to write true stories, but, at a certain point, the story becomes unbearable, precisely because of its truth, and so I’m forced to change it.”
Even a novel drawn from reality, faithful to it, is not the truth, just as the image in the mirror is not a person in flesh and blood. It remains, that is, an abstraction, no matter how realistic, how close to the facts. In the words of Lalla Romano — another writer who in her novels has, like Kristóf, always played with things that really happened—“in a book everything is true, nothing is true.”
Everything has to be reconsidered, shaped anew. Autobiographical fiction, even if it is inspired by reality, by memory, requires a rigorous selection, a merciless cutting. One writes with the pen, but in the end, to create the right form, one has to use, like Matisse, a good pair of scissors.
My journey is coming to an end. I have to leave Rome this year and return to America. I have no desire to. I wish there were a way of staying in this country, in this language.
I’m already afraid of the separation between me and Italian. At the same time I’m aware of a significant, formal distance between me and English, an idiom in which I haven’t read for three years. The decision to read only in Italian led me to take this new creative path. Writing comes from reading. Now, in spite of my uneasiness, I prefer to write in Italian. Even if I remain half blind, I can see certain things more clearly. I feel more centered even if I’m adrift. I feel more at home, in spite of the discomfort.