Eri De Luca. “The spirit of contradiction gave me the strength to leave everything at the age of 18 without knowing where I was going.”

The filiation between the subject collection where we will find a new version of it soldier’s mistake which confronts a daughter with her Nazi father, and the Quarto collection from Éditions Gallimard, which brings together her best-known works (Sour, Rainbow, Three Horses, Butterfly Weight, Montedidio…), Eri De Luca is doubly honored these days. The great Italian writer born in Naples in 1950, who until 1976 was active in the extreme left revolutionary movement, working as a worker, working as a worker, is the author of a work haunted by the shadows of the Second World War. , the Holocaust and the revolutionary struggles of the past. An avid and inveterate reader of the Bible, he published novels and poems, as well as meditations on the Old Testament and translations from Hebrew and Yiddish. An interview with an atypical autistic, in language as powerful as it is refined.

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Madame Figaro . – Will you tell me about the origin? Complete ?
Erie DeLuca. – It was not a personal project. The Museum of Jewish Art and History asked me to choose a piece and write on it. I chose Marc Chagall’s portrait of his father. Chagall is one of my favorite artists, I know this because I usually can’t get enough of paintings. The demarcation of their frame forces me to look for what is left outside, to imagine what has not been painted. This is not the case of Chagall. His pictures are enough for me… Chagall painted his father when he was not there. he was far away, both in space and time. It was 1911, Chagall was in Paris on his way to becoming a famous artist, and he felt the need to represent his father in real scale, “life size”, hence the name of the collection.

My life remains my life, and not the biography it makes for readers

Erie De Luca

So was this father-son relationship a starter?
Yes, and I first associated it with the most violent father-son relationship, between Abraham and Isaac. Where the greatness is due not to Abraham’s obedience to the deity asking him to sacrifice his son to him, but to Isaac’s obedience to Abraham. For if in the history of art they are represented as a man with the face of a little boy, the opposite is true: Abraham is 100 years old, and Isaac is tall and strong, because he carries all on his back; the wood needed for the sacrifice all along the ascent of Mt. He could slip away and leave his father to take care of his divinity… But where would he go after humiliating and denying his father? Therefore, his attitude affirms the height of filial obedience. From this summit we descend to explore all kinds of stories between parents and children, including my own.

You say that all your books are autobiographical. So your Quarto is a self-portrait?
It is. All Quartos include personal information and photos, and this one is no exception. But I would say that my life remains my life, not the biography that makes it up for the readers. Raw material can be seen there. I took zigzags out of my existence, fragments that allowed me to find people who are characters for the readers, but not for me. The impetus for starting a text is always to find someone or something; childhood, Naples, the island of Ischia and all the places where I fell. Because I didn’t choose, I’m the one on whom a century has fallen. Born in the second half of the century, but infected by the first, its emigration, its wars and the extermination of the Jews of Europe, which wounded our civilization and forced me to learn Yiddish, this language that we wanted to drown under the world. penny Revolutionary because the century was revolutionary. a worker, because the century was a worker. mountaineer, because my father had this desire for mountains.

From him, you say, “you took the books and the mountain”…
And regrets. My father regretted that he had not done everything he wanted to do. Thus, he voted socialist, but did not engage in political activity during the war. Naples was liberated in 1943, and he then tried to make up for his life, which had been put on hold: he was a soldier, without bothering to participate in the liberation of the rest of Italy. It is a regret that weighed on him that he expressed and I inherited. I think I took everything he couldn’t… As for the books, they were really his and not the books he recommended to me. I was allowed to take them, even though I was a child who knew nothing about them, and when I entered them, I began to penetrate the lives of adults. Those who seemed to me like giants began to crumble, losing their consistency and authority. A lawsuit was filed against them against the distance between what they said and what they did, a discrepancy in which I saw injustice. I experienced a sense of disillusionment that introduced me to a spirit of contradiction that took root in me and gave me the strength to leave everything at 18 without knowing where I was going. Reading my father’s books established my personality.

I write by hand, and when I finish a story, I don’t read it again. I duplicate it, with the same slowness as when I first committed it to paper

Erie De Luca

You are a committed person, but not of socio-political literature, strictly speaking…
I tell stories, and stories have no theory or thesis to prove. On the other hand, I assume obligations as a citizen and take advantage of the fact that I am recognized to give importance to the causes to which I remain loyal. As a writer speech is my domain and I must do something that everyone has the right to speak, not as such because we are in a democracy, but speech that is heard because men and women fight while no one else there is none. hears. I am not a spokesperson, because they wear it very well without me, but an amplifier. Just as a shoemaker must first make good shoes and then see if he can do something for his society to ensure that everyone is well clothed, so as a citizen I try to ensure that those under threat are heard. whether they are migrants, parents of children poisoned by steel mills or residents of Val di Sousa. (Eri De Luca defended the latter from piercing the Lyon-Tour line and was charged with “inciting subversion” before being released in 2016. Opposite Wordeditor’s note).

And what are you connected to as a writer?
Knowing the stories I tell well and telling them in the most accurate and precise language possible. You have to find the right tone of voice. My stories are spoken and my sentences have the breath needed to read them. They should come one after the other as if they caused each other, in the most fluid way possible. I write by hand, and when I finish a story, I don’t read it again. I duplicate it, with the same slowness as when I first put it on paper. If I want to copy it, it’s because I like the story. And if it resists the third copy, I know it’s good, I can submit it to my editor.

full, Erie De Luca, Ed. Gallimard, 176 pages, 18 euros. Routes, by Erie De Luca, coll. “Quarto” Ed. Gallimard, 1024 pages, 26 euros. Translated from Italian by Daniel Valin.

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