Novelists From Italy

"I am appalled by how things are going with Putin, his homophobic laws, the censorship, pedophilia used as a criminal means of earning money. Western-style corruption has taken over, which is why Putin and Berlusconi are such friends, and even look like each other: both of them have undergone plastic surgery to look younger, but only Satan never ages. They are demons. [...] I no longer have the stomach to live in such a country, where the only way out left is suicide. [...] We need a new revolution, of ideas, not weapons."

"Development is here, Russia is growing and Europe has every interest in making a deal with them, freeing itself from the yoke of American private multinationals. I speak as an Italian citizen, as an Italian patriot. Our economy, the real one, does not need this system that is now bankrupt. It must free itself from the grip of America and Brussels."

"Not only have I never gone to school, but not even the Holden school, which keeps ignoring me anyway."

"When I did military service in the sabotage squad and captured Islamic terrorists, we'd adopt a practice of preparation for interrogations which has always bothered me. [...] First of all we'd remove their trousers and underpants. Then we'd make a sort of gag with their socks which we'd stuff into their mouths. [...] I didn't get it at first. Then I asked our captain about it. [...] He explained that this practice had been studied by some psychologists, and that it served to deprive the prisoners of their own dignity, and therefore break them. So when we brought them before the interrogator, the terrorists would start talking immediately. It wasn't so hard to extract information from them at that point."

"In war, I had no time for understanding. It’s really fast and you think only of your mission. If you start to think about morality, you will die, because you lose control. You can’t think about life, you must think only of war so you will survive."

"He has never lived in Siberia and this whole criminal story about the Urka people in Siberian Education (Einaudi), who never existed, is fiction from beginning to end. Nicolai easily and even skillfully collects artistic facts that can actually be found in Russian and Soviet writers, for example, Dostoevsky, and which, over time, turn into stereotypes and prejudices about Russia and Siberia in the minds of readers. And on this basis it transforms them into presumed facts of modern, current reality. This is called an artistic hoax."

"Siberian Education feels like a compendium of the dark fantasies that Westerners have about Transdniester as a place where people are left to fend for themselves or establish their own law. The reader is led to believe that the laws of the Siberian urkas are but one set of these surrogate forms of authority that exist in the black hole of Europe. It is a laughable portrayal."

"This book reads like a fantasist's ravings [...]. The success of Educazione siberiana implies that Italian publishing is floundering in the same cesspit as Italian television. One can only hope that British readers are not so gullible."

"According to Lilin, the very existence of the Urkas was a state secret. An almost extinct community, which had left a deep mark, single-handedly winning the war of 1992, when Moldova, in the grip of hot post-Soviet spirits, invaded the breakaway province. In Siberian Education, it is narrated how the "Siberians" triumphed by blowing up one of the two cinemas in Bender full of soldiers. Marian Bozhesku, Ukrainian researcher and author of Transnistria 1989-1992, the most exhaustive study on the conflict, says he has never heard of this. "For us the memory of the war is still very much alive, we fought desperately. To say that criminals won it is ridiculous", says indignant Denis Poronok, who is the same age as Lilin, 31, and disputes "Nicolai's version": "The blown up cinema is a fairy tale, and there were four theaters, not two in Bender in 1992"."

"The war will not be short, it will be long, but Russia will be victorious for a simple reason: we are in the midst of a change in the world order. The West will no longer be able to extend its dominion and supremacy over a part of the world."

"Actually, I now consider myself Italian in all respects. I have Italian citizenship, it would be wrong and incorrect to define myself as Russian, although I have recently received quite a few attacks from my former fellow Russian citizens."

"One time, I found a kidnapped boy of 10 or 12, really dirty, really scared [...]. I preferred to see dead people. Alive was more terrible, because their condition was like dead. All those people who stayed a year or more in the terrorist camps had psychological troubles for the rest of their lives. He slept on my arm and our doctor told me to keep holding him, because he was nervous, he needed to feel my body to sleep. When I saw Salvatores' film, with the kidnapped boy, it was like reality for me. I told my manager, "he can make the film because he doesn’t care about money or public opinion [or even recreating] things in a perfect historical way, he cares about the true story inside the person"."

"If you read Wikipedia it seems that the Moldovans tried to re-annex Transnistria which in the meantime had proclaimed itself independent. It is half true. First of all, the Moldovans did not want to leave the Soviet Union. They left because some corrupt politicians, paid by Western oligarchs, destroyed the USSR. An army of mercenaries from all over the world arrived here: Hungarians, Germans, people from the Baltic countries. If the war lasted only two months it is precisely because the majority of the Moldovan people were against it and did not want to invade us. The greatest number of victims occurred during the first few days, when people were simply massacred while they tried to return home in fear. The first resistance, the most consistent, was popular. We kids rode the streets on bicycles and collected ammunition, we took weapons and other useful things from the dead. We followed the movements of military vehicles and reported them to the adults. It also happened that we fired Kalashnikovs in firefights. At that time the people in my building lived in my house because we had water from the well and several supplies of canned food. In the apartments there was no electricity, nor gas, they also cut off the water in the whole city because the mercenaries had tried to poison it. There were also several elderly people who needed medicine; in our courtyard we had a small refugee camp."

"The champion of this club of oligarchs is Soros, who organizes revolutions and pushes global projects. In Italy we welcomed him with all honors, but perhaps it would have been better to treat him like the criminal he is. Here, people like him certainly have connections with the IOC and have all the tools to manipulate these people."

"Atheism is a religion. Declaring that you don't believe in anything is like saying you believe in something. In this way, they are a group, a cult."

"The [Second Chechen War] was caused by America's attempt to gain control of the Caspian Sea, this extraordinary energy reserve, a crucial geographic point for controlling all the former Soviet republics and Iran, where the viaducts transporting oil and gas run. To do so, they knew full well what the best tool was destabilizing Chechnya and Dagestan. The war in Chechnya began on the basis of this geopolitical premise: the United States' attempt to hold the Islamic Republic of Iran in check and seize Russia's historical territories. The forces in play at the time were the Russians, including the Chechens, and terrorists infiltrated by the CIA through a state that had sold itself to the Americans: Georgia."

"The novels and essays of Natalia Ginzburg (among them, The Manzoni Family and The Little Virtues) address both her Sephardic ancestry and her leftist political philosophy."

"Our dreams are never realized and as soon as we see them betrayed we realize that the intensest joys of our life have nothing to do with reality. No sooner do we see them betrayed than we are consumed with regret for the time when they glowed within us. And in this succession of hopes and regrets our life slips by."

"(prompt: "The book that changed my life") I was well into my 30s when I read The Little Virtues by Natalia Ginzburg and as soon as I began I felt myself deeply connected. It isn’t that it’s the greatest book in the world, but for me it was vital. I felt she was showing me the type of writer I had it in me to be. One of the essays – “My Vocation” – really hit the nail on the head. I identified profoundly with the way in which Ginzburg traced her own development as a nonfiction writer. It made me realise that it was only through this kind of writing I could employ my own storytelling gifts. I reread it irregularly but quite a lot, and I’m always amazed by what she is able to accomplish with the small personal essay."

"What we must remember above all in the education of our children is that their love of life should never weaken."

"When I write something I usually think it is very important and that I am a very fine writer. I think this happens to everyone. But there is one corner of my mind in which I know very well what I am, which is a small, a very small writer. I swear I know it. But that doesn't matter much to me. Only, I don't want to think about names: I can see that if I am asked 'a small writer like who?' it would sadden me to think of the names of other small writers. I prefer to think that no one has ever been like me, however small, however much a mosquito or a flea of a writer I may be. The important thing is to be convinced that this really is your vocation, your profession, something you will do all your life."

"Human relationships have to be rediscovered every day. We have to remember constantly that every kind of meeting with our neighbor is a human action and so it is always evil or good, true or deceitful, a kindness or a sin."

"A journalist recently said in the newspapers that writers should keep their mouths shut as much as possible and I think he was probably right. Better to write than to speak."

"if we ourselves have a vocation, if we have not betrayed it, if over the years we have continued to love it, to serve it passionately, we are able to keep all sense of ownership out of our love for our children. But if on the other hand we do not have a vocation, or if we have abandoned it or betrayed it out of cynicism or a fear of life, or because of mistaken parental love, or because of some little virtue that exists within us, then we cling to our children as a shipwrecked mariner clings to a tree trunk."

"(PB: You wrote your essay “The Little Virtues” a long time ago, really in another age. A number of American readers are very much taken with the piece while finding it a direct challenge to their familiar assumptions. Would you still offer parents the same advice with regard to the upbringing of their children or have your thoughts changed?) NG: I’m sure that I would write exactly the same thing; even in these difficult times one should only teach the big virtues, generosity more than anything else. The rest can be learned later on."

"what a job of ants and horses translation is. (PB: Ants and horses?) NG: One has to be as exact and industrious as an ant and have the impetus, the strength, of a horse to pull ahead."

"He knew how to find time to study and to write, to earn his living and to wander idly through the streets he loved; whereas we, who staggered from laziness to frantic activity and back again, wasted our time trying to decide whether we were lazy or industrious"

"for a mistake, my God, you don’t make a child suffer!"

"My Jewish identity became extremely important to me from the moment the Jews began to be persecuted. At that point I became aware of myself as a Jew. But I came from a mixed marriage—my father was Jewish, my mother Catholic. My parents were atheists and therefore chose not to give us, the children, any religious instruction. They were totally non-observant. You might say that a Hebrew spirit dominated the household in the sense that my father had a very strong, very authoritarian character. And I suppose it’s true that many of the family friends were Jews, but many were not. So, while I did not have any sort of formal Jewish upbringing, I nevertheless felt my Jewishness very acutely during the war years (my first husband, Leone Ginzburg, was a Jew) and after the war, when it became known what had been done to the Jews in the camps by the Nazis. Suddenly my Jewishness became very important to me."

"unfortunately, a great number of judges and social workers are rigidly unable to judge cases in a human way."

"Style is not something that can be improvised: one has to construct it, to make it."

"(there must have been other writers whom you regarded as models.) NG: In my adolescence, the Russians were tremendously important to me. More than anyone, Chekhov. Of the Italians, Svevo, the Moravia of Gli Indifferenti. When I started writing these were the writers I kept before me."

"in my own work...there’s an important sense of the visual, of the visualized. I see it all so vividly. It’s not that I don’t see what I imagine. If I don’t see it then I can’t write anything."

"I believe the family to be terribly important, even when it is obsessive or repressive or full of insidious germs which can pollute life. But it’s a necessary institution, a way in which children become adults, for which there’s no substitute."

"(Are there other English language writers who mean a lot to you?) NG: Well, of course, Shakespeare. And I love George Eliot as well. I’ve read the major authors, but in Italian, not English. Perhaps my favorite English novelist is Jane Austen. I hardly know contemporary American literature. The two American authors I love most, who are by now dead, alas, are Carson McCullers and Flannery O’Connor. And then I love Fitzgerald and Hemingway—especially the Hemingway of the stories...When Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology came out in Italian, suddenly there was widespread interest in North American writing. But even before that Pavese was busy introducing us all to the great American writers."

"Groups? Movements? I don’t really think these groups exist. I don’t think in Italy there even are such things as currents or trends. The whole scene is really much too chaotic for such groups to form and stay together as separate entities."

"dialect is really impossible to translate adequately."

"Fanfares of trumpets usually announced only small, futile things, it was a way fate had of teasing people. You felt a great exaltation and heard a loud fanfare of trumpets in the sky. But the serious things of life, on the contrary, took you by surprise, they spurted up all of a sudden like water."

"they laughed a little and were very friendly together, the three of them, Anna, Emanuele and Giustino; and they were pleased to be together, the three of them, thinking of all those who were dead, and of the long war and the sorrow and noise and confusion, and of the long, difficult life which they saw in front of them now, full of all the things they did not know how to do.”"

"But it was incredible how fear and danger never produced ignoble words but always true ones, words that were torn from your very heart."

"I’m not really a poet. It’s only once in a while that what I have to say seems to find its best expression in a poem. But I do read a number of poets—Montale, Sandro Penna, Sabba."

"Every time I sit down to write a book I feel that I have to start from zero, that I have to re-learn how to write."

"The fact that I can tell stories not only by writing them but also by living them through a character and therefore giving the public emotions (possibly positive), which is the ultimate goal of entertainment."

"Always remember that the only riches we possess are the dreams we have as children. They are the fuel of our lives, the only force that pushes us to keep on going even when things have gone all wrong."

"Just work, work, work, even at the risk of making mistakes. And if and when you do make mistakes, and you do hurt someone, ask for forgiveness. Asking forgiveness and admitting you've made a mistake is the hardest thing of all. But if someone else does you good, remember it always. Showing gratitude is every bit as complicated."

"Every one of us has already experienced thousands of last times without even realizing it. Most of the time, in fact, you never even imagine that what you're experiencing is the last time."

"Trust yourself. Even if you're really, really scared, never let on that you are."

"Siamo angeli con un'ala soltanto e possiamo volare solo restando abbracciati."

"Have you ever asked yourselves why Mafias from all over the world are constantly opening restaurants, cafes or shops? Because this type of commercial activity has huge amounts of cash coming in. A Mafioso businessman’s number one priority is not to make money, but to hand out receipts in order to justify money that he already has. In Italy, where tax avoidance is extremely high, we know that when a shopkeeper is reluctant to give you a receipt he or she is almost definitely committing an offence, but almost definitely not a Mafioso. Businesses run by the Mafia will always give you a receipt. And the , in the years of the wavering ruble, safely stored away its money in London’s luxury homes, fuelling London’s property bubble with dirty money. The fictitious buying and selling of property is one of organised crime’s favourite ways of laundering money. ... This is how entire neighbourhoods in London are becoming unoccupied, turning into investments’ empty spaces. Money moves in, and people move out."

"But the problem is that the boundaries of tax havens themselves can become very blurred. London is an international financial system that sees trillions of dollars from all over the world go through it each year, and that offers the most sought after financial services. This alone would be enough to make this city a desired anchorage for those looking to launder and reinvest unlawful funds. But there is more; besides this, the British capital is at the heart of the world’s most important offshore system."