The words that tell a life. The sayings, the daily vocabulary, the lemmas that have marked the passage of time. The reassuring and sometimes chaotic words spoken by the mother and the more stringent ones by the father. The everyday language and the more official one that has followed each of us since we were kids. A microcosm made of expressions that draw, little by little, the biography of a person. Phrases that represent the deepest identity of Tommaso Giartosio, author of ‘Autobiogrammatica’ (Minimum Fax). It is the book that has become part of a certain experimental sense of the Strega prize sestina representing small publishers, as required by the recognition regulations for a few years now. Born with the aim of reconstructing a person’s life through words, the book has so far convinced voters by keeping faith with one of the many vocations of the award: that of opening up to novelties and experimentation in the narrative field.
A result that gives Giartosio a great “emotion” that arises first of all from the possibility of participating in the final stages of recognition with “a small publisher and with a novel that tries to do something similar to what books far away in time have done that they set out on new paths”, says the writer interviewed by AdnKronos citing it as an example ‘Mortally Wounded’ by Raffaele La Capria who won the laurel in 1961. “That was a time when the Strega was also a showcase of very innovative ways of doing literature. Of course, I don’t want to compare myself to a work like that of La Capria”, he observes.
The ‘promotion’ of ‘Autobiogrammatica’, reflects Giartosio, “fulfills a vocation of the prize by giving it continuity. I believe it is a good thing that a literary prize is able to circulate books that change our idea of making literature or try to do so. A circle is triggered virtuoso in which a more experimental approach comes into contact with a much larger number of readers”.
From the emotions aroused by the possibility of playing one’s cards up to the finish line of the final evening of July 4th at the Nymphaeum of Villa Giulia in Rome, Giartosio then traces the main elements of the method he followed for writing the book. “I started – he explains – from the observation that we are besieged by autobiographies, autofiction and memoirs. It is, of course, a virtuous siege that evidently responds to our time. A siege of which I am therefore also part. I myself am an avid reader of autobiographical stories.”
In this sense, he continues, “I am particularly interested in the idea of a project of narrating one’s life that is broad and has strong reasons. On the one hand we have the autobiographies of film stars or sportsmen, perhaps written with ‘help from a professional journalist’. On the other “there are ordinary people. If they want to tell their lives they must be able to show that they have something to say that deserves the reader’s attention. In my case, to do so it seemed to me that the best thing was to use language as a key of reading”.
This is because “language is something we all possess, I am deeply convinced that each of us has a profound relationship with words. Psychoanalysis itself is based on the idea that the words of the common man and the common woman are full of meaning. So telling a life through the axis of the relationship with language seemed like an interesting project to me.” A project that starts “even from a sort of pre-linguistic silence which for me is connected to the figure of the father”.
A figure who with his speech “is from time to time taciturn, elusive, or official. However, at the same time, he leaves room for the words of his children who can find their own language”. Next to that of the father, there is also the language of the mother. “It is proliferating, chaotic, a jungle of expressions, recurring jokes, idioms. A form of linguistic generosity but also something in which you can get caught,” says Giartosio, referring to an illustrious example. “The obvious comparison, which I also make explicit, is the one with the ‘Family Lexicon’ by Natalia Ginzburg“.
The writer took language into consideration, highlighting its positive aspects, underlines the writer, who highlights: “She described the lexicon as a sort of happiness. She writes in her book – Giartosio recalls – that if she had found herself with her brothers in a large cave, or in a large square with millions of people around, they would have recognized each other through words. In this case, therefore, the familiar lexicon is like a harmonious opportunity to recognize oneself. I think, however, that language is something in which you recognize yourself but also something you get trapped in, something you want to do but from which you also have to free yourself.”
Giartosio’s book does not take on the tone and pace of an essay but of a full and composite narrative. “Telling the language of my father and my mother also corresponds to the description of how they were, highlighting their conflicts and their torments. The whole chapter on the mother – he remarks – is orchestrated around her illness until her death. A passage in which the way in which relationships with children changes also emerges. I tried to introduce and support a strong narrative element precisely because I had to somehow balance the presence of an expository fabric on language”, he concludes.