Hermit in Paris Read Free

contemporary man. This is where any poetic and moral unity in my work should be sought.
    Who is your favourite contemporary Italian novelist? And which of the
younger writers interests you most?
    I think that Pavese remains the most important, most complex and the densest Italian writer of our time. Whatever problem you set yourself, you cannot but refer back to him, both as a literary expert and as a writer. Vittorini, too, with the literary discourse he initiated, influenced my development strongly. I say ‘initiated’, because today we have the impression that it was a discourse left half-finished, which we are waiting to take up again. Later on, once we had got beyond the phase of a predominant interest in new experiments with language, I moved closer to Moravia, who is the only writer in Italy who is an author in a way that I would call ‘institutional’: that is, he produces at regular intervals works which each time chart the moral definitions of our times, definitions which deal with the way we behave, the way society is developing, and general trends in the way we think. My penchant for Stendhal makes me feel I have much in common with Tobino, 4 though I cannot forgive him his affected glorying in being provincial and, what’s more, Tuscan. I have a particular predilection for and indeed friendship with Carlo Levi, 5 first and foremost because of his anti-romantic polemics, and secondly because his non-fiction narratives represent the most serious way forward for a literature that deals with society in a problematic manner; however, I do not go along with his claim that today this kind of narrative must replace the novel, which, as far as I am concerned, serves other purposes.
    Turning to younger writers, in the small group of authors born around 1915, Cassola 6 and Bassani 7 ; have set about studying certain fractures in the Italian middle-class conscience, and theirs are the most interesting stories that one can read nowadays; but in Cassola I would criticize a certain superficiality of reactions in the way his works deal with human relationships, and in Bassani the hint of preciosity that makes you think of the Crepuscular poets in Italy. Among those of us who are even younger and who began by working with story-formats that were tough, set among workers, full of action, the one who has gone furthest down that road is Rea. 8 Now there is Pasolini, one of the foremost exponents of his generation both as poet and as a literary expert: he has written a novel about which I feel many reservations as regards its ‘poetics’, but the more one thinks about it, the more you feel it is something which is well-finished and which will last.
    Which is your favourite contemporary foreign novelist?
    I wrote an article about a year ago on what Hemingway meant for me when I started out as a writer. Once I realized that Hemingway was not enough for me, I cannot say that his place has been taken by any other contemporary author. For the last five or six years, like everyone else, I have been making inroads into Thomas Mann, and I am more and more impressed by the richness of his subject matter. However, I continue to believe that nowadays we have to write in a different way. I am freer in my relationships with writers of the past and I indulge in limitless enthusiasms; in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries I have a whole host of models and writers I regard as friends whom I never tire of going back to.
    How have your books been received outside Italy?
    It is too soon to say.
The Cloven Viscount
is just coming out in France, and will come out shortly in Germany.
The Path to the
Spiders’ Nests
will be published in Britain in the spring, to be followed six months later by
Adam, One Afternoon
.
    What are you working on now?
    I never count my chickens until they’re hatched.
    Do you think writers should be involved in politics? And how should
they do so? To what political tendency do you belong?
    I believe that all men