Daniele Mencarelli: "Transformation is within the concept of existence"

Until December 1st Genoa is the protagonist of the festival of Passage which was born with the idea of ​​overcoming the limitation of many festivals, which do not establish a dialogue with the territory capable of going beyond the days of the event and are therefore aimed at an audience, rather than a community. “Transformations” is the theme of this second edition, chosen to reflect on the ways in which literature speaks of this time in which everything continually changes.
The Passaggio meetings tell us that transformations are everywhere: in those places, apparently immobile and so threatened, that are bookshops; in those human faces that have become, with the practice of selfies, the first destination of our own gazes, in the drifts of progress, in our relationship with the body, with identity, with death. The transformations concern sexual gender, our relationship with memory and feelings.

The writer and screenwriter Daniele Mencarelli, author of the book “Everything asks for salvation”, now also a popular Netflix series, talks to AGI about “transformations” and how the theme is central to his latest novel “Burn the origin” released in October by Einaudi.

Transformations is the main theme of the Passaggio festival in Genoa. What does this word bring to mind?
“In my opinion it is one of the few fitting synonyms with respect to the concept of existence, this continuous evolution of man within reality and within reality, within encounters. If we want, the founding nucleus of literature is also transformation. Transformation, life and literature are, in my opinion, three words that can be approached with great sincerity.”

In his books, there is a lot of talk about personal, sometimes very painful, journeys. How much can literature help us find ourselves or feel less alone in the face of even disorienting changes?
“I make a fundamental distinction. Literature, although it will never save the world or stop a war, can make an important contribution to the growth of an individual and what we read. For me, the poetry that I read between the ages of 15 and 16 and which I have never stopped reading was fundamental. I refer to that exercise of reading as a fundamental exercise in knowing oneself and the world through others. Writing can be used as a tool for self-therapy and investigation. For me, writing has never been a form of self-therapy, but it has always been a gesture that followed the other. Literature that helps others is the one we embrace as readers by entering the space and time of other human beings.”

In “Brucia l’origine”, your latest novel (Einaudi editions), how present is the theme of transformation?
“In the case of Gabriele, the protagonist, the transformation he has made is positive. It led him to greater economic availability, more culture, greater personal affirmation. When he returns to his neighborhood of origin, this transformation, paradoxically, does not help him to live the relationship with his origins better, but turns into an obstacle and shame for him. Transformation is something we must embrace and cannot censor. If we censor it, as Gabriele does, it risks becoming a wearing element.

In this latest work, “Sunday lunch” is recurring. Rites, traditions, what role do they play in a constantly evolving world, which seems to be going faster and faster?
Rites are important if they do not become the flat and anachronistic reiteration of a habit that we maintain only by convention. Gabriele returns to Rome to find his friends who he hasn’t seen for eight years and finds them in the exact same life they had as kids. They defend it in a more or less conscious way. In a way that has never seen them within a possibility of transformation. The misfortune of never finding the drive, even just because of a feeling of restlessness, to change, to transform. His friends have remained identical and defend this immobility as a value. Gabriele, on the other hand, has done a lot, but in these exchanges he does not find a point of balance. It is often like this, those who live within many different worlds and those who remain stationary for their entire lives, these two forms of existence end up becoming irreconcilable with each other. Finding a point of balance becomes difficult.”

Which side are you on?
“I am on the side of those who experience the transformation with all the associated and connected risks. Of those who return to their origins and perhaps experience the struggle of those who, by transforming themselves, have distanced themselves from what they left behind.”

Often the neighborhoods of Rome act as the theater for his stories. What do you find fascinating about these suburbs?
“The neighborhood of “Brucia l’origine” is the Appio-Tuscolano which I have known well since I was a child. That quadrant is a bit like the litmus test of an entire country because since the Second World War it has been a neighborhood that has slowly grown. Via Lemonia, il Parco degli Acquedotti in the 1970s it was the second largest slum in Rome. The whole city was made up of camps. In the 1990s, Via Tuscolana was one of the largest commercial streets in Europe and today that neighborhood is experiencing a downward spiral of impoverishment. Today Via Tuscolana is melancholy to those who remember it in the past. The redistribution of wealth is contracting, with the poor continuing to grow. And then there are those neighborhoods that are beyond the GRA and present an even different Rome. The Appio Tuscolano is a border line”.

“Everything asks for salvation” is now a successful Netflix series. What was it like going from the book to the small screen?
“I immediately decided to stay within this transformation because I had the underlying theme at heart, which is that of psychological distress. Having experienced it from the inside, like all transformations, it didn’t shock me too much. Of course, I experienced the public’s judgment with great tension. However, I experienced the adaptation from a literary language to a serial language with great participation and passion, but from within. This was a great fortune.”