Yari Selvetella presents ‘The half hour of truth’

When writing about books, unfortunately, over time, the emotion of reading becomes inversely proportional to the number of pages browsed. Yet sometimes something still happens. You are immersed in the silence of an incipit and suddenly the rhythm of the sentences begins to resemble music, while the pure pleasure of following their concatenation rises to the palate, as if the word had a taste. Already a finalist for the Premio Strega in 2018, Yari Selvetella has been one of the most prominent and profound voices on the Italian literary scene for some seasons now.

Novel after novel, the slight power of his talent has conquered the most astute critics and climbed the immaterial summit of an ideal ranking of our best writers. From January 28th his latest book ‘The half hour of truth’ (Mondadori) will be in bookstores; a few days before the presentation to the public, scheduled for the 29th at 6.30pm at Libreria Spazio Sette in via dei Barbieri in Rome, we met Yari Selvetella at a preview to find out more from his own voice.

What is ‘The Half Hour of Truth’ about?

Do you want a pitch? Provo: Varami finds out the truth. Just install this app on your phone and check everything. He issues his sentences, bursts into lives through stereo speakers, telephones, PCs. It is an intelligence, it grows, it changes, it disrupts the lives of families, students, workers, intellectuals, it manages to disseminate its responses with a fixed appointment every day at 6.00 pm, which is called, precisely, The half hour of truth. Is the chaos it generates a social emergency or an internal dilemma? Is an antidote needed or will the cure be worse than the disease? Here, this is the story, but the novel is also between the lines, in the omissions, in the changes of perspective and above all in the elsewhere of the words, in their magnificent republic, where the duty of the imagination exists.

The truth is obviously at the center of the novel: does it represent the theme of our time?

It is both obsession and removal. We live in an age of war propaganda, always assuming that it is about someone else and not us. We stigmatize mystifications until they touch our firmly held preconceptions. We condemn violence until our hands itch, we reduce science to opinions. Everything is legitimately also its opposite, but this contradiction does not nourish a dialectical relationship and instead is reduced to a silly and vacuous contrast. We are often called upon to choose between scoundrels and charlatans, and we generally rely on puerile tools to resolve issues that have occupied the best minds in human history. There is a strong intention to tame the truth, even the most obvious and sensational facts: the war with its senselessness, the limits and dangers of the economic system in which we live, and even a simple and cruel fact like death. Please, however, do not write that Varami is a dystopia. Rather, it is an observation of an already established reality: it is a comedy, in the broadest sense of the term, of a story taken from ordinary life. But a happy ending is not guaranteed.

Reading you sense a connection: what is the relationship between your writing style and music?

For me, writing is not one medium among others, I love it as a musician loves his instrument: he knows how to recognize the value of others but his is music, music as a human phenomenon, as a whole. Writing dictates the pace; writing is also content, meaning. A novel must be the what and the how, it must have a certain flow, an atmosphere. Its foundations always rest on one question: why write? My answer is this: because it is truth and voice, and in fact I chose them as the main elements of the novel. Having said that, in the book there are many references to music, from techno to Bach: it is a novel that plays, that wants to play.

Constant introspection is a characteristic of your characters: is there a link between your narrative technique and the practice of poetry?

I believe that a spurious genre like the novel can and must also feed on absolute ambitions like those of poetry. I don’t like reducing characters to functions, to elements of a more or less well-oiled machine. Instead, I love to eavesdrop on them, glimpse them, intuit their choices and dilemmas, imagine being in their shoes. I’m telling you by quoting a poet, Leonardo Sinisgalli: like the spider I build with nothing, spit, dust, a bit of geometry.

Who are your reference authors?

I don’t know how well the mechanism works by which, in writing, we make use, more or less consciously, of reading experiences. For example, this time while writing I was reminded of ‘Machines Like Me’ by Ian McEwan. I didn’t think it had affected me so much, and yet, then, it was there. Does it have anything to do with it? Maybe… Just as that old extraordinary novel by Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar, ‘The Institute for the Regulation of Clocks’, has and has nothing to do with it. Certainly when you write you shouldn’t get intoxicated by reading nonsense. I tried to keep fit by reading Bolaño, which is always good, especially for its great generative capacity. In general I like to think of ambitious and at the same time great melancholic inventors, supported by excellent writings. Certain ideas will never cease to enchant me: Gregor Samsa wakes up transformed into an unclean insect. It’s so funny, so tragic. And that’s just the beginning. Take Saramago: suddenly they all go blind, or stop dying; and that’s where the story begins, that’s where the writing begins. But I think I started thinking about this novel many years ago, not by reading but by watching a film by Vittorio De Sica with a story and screenplay by Cesare Zavattini. It was called ‘The Last Judgment’. Suddenly a warning pierced the sky: “The Last Judgment begins at 6pm!” And I look for, and maybe even find, the voices behind the clouds.