Carrère wins the European Witch and goes out to meet migrants – Corriere.it

TURIN Emmanuel Carrre won the European Strega prize, but keeps well away from geopolitical analyses: his gaze on the continent has another filter. If, on the sidelines of the awards ceremony at the Turin Readers’ Club, he is asked how he sees Europe, for example on one of the most serious and divisive problems concerning the continent and the opposition it causes – migration, the , deaths at sea — he replies in his own way: I’m incapable of giving clear judgments on topics like this, but I can leave, go reportage and tell. I need a story to tell, I don’t know how to do analysis. So this summer I’m going to board a Médecins Sans Frontières ship off the coast of Libya and then I’m going to write about all this. What prompts you to leave? This is only discovered later, she smiles. And on the war in Ukraine that brought Europe back to a gloomy twentieth century that we thought would never return, he says that it is also a war that forced Europe to react, uniting more. Until a year ago, for me, talking about Europe could have something rhetorical, now it has something urgent.

Understanding the starting point of each of his works, he also said this in the morning, in the meeting at the Salone with Marco Imarisio, specifying that understanding does not mean justifying: I don’t see why this desire to understand shouldn’t also apply to what the Russians are doing in the Ukraine or how Russian power is dealing with its population. I am interested in knowing Putin’s reasons, just as we were interested in the reasons of the commander of Treblinka even if, he added: I think Russia is turning into a dystopia, a parallel universe: a large part of the population, due to propaganda, he lives in a completely different world than ours.

Carrre
won
with

V13
(Adelphi)
is the tenth edition of the European Strega awarded to writers recently translated in Italy who have already won an important prize in their country. Literature also serves to build bridges, to bring people from different places into dialogue, to make people communicate, said Giovanni Solimine, president of the Bellonci Foundation which organizes the prize together with Strega Alberti in collaboration with Bper Banca, the International Book Fair and the Fondazione Readers’ Club of Turin. And this recognition born as a tribute of the Italian writers winners of the Strega Prize to their European colleagues. Last year we hoped that this year we would see a different Europe, but this is not the case. We continue to hope so.

Many authors awarded in these ten years – underlined Stefano Petrocchi, director of the Bellonci Foundation –
testify with their works, but also with their lives, a welcoming space in a Europe still to be built together, with those born here and with those who arrived later.Carrre, who won Le prix Aujourd’hui in his homeland with this book, told how this one was born


volume that takes its name from the trial for the Bataclan massacre, which took place in Paris on November 13, 2015. The writer followed him every day, closed in that white box built specifically to contain 600 people, the survivors, the families of the victims, the journalists.

Compared to his other books, in V13 Carrre puts himself aside, without giving up that narrative montage that characterizes his writing, alternating the news, the testimonies, with philosophical reflections that essentially revolve around the contrast between good and evil. And, for the first time Carrre, who often investigated evil, said he was more won over by good, by victims. Mind you, I’m not saying that they were all saints, I certainly found myself faced with the representation of very strong but also absolutely magnificent experiences. This process was terrible, but there were also very beautiful moments, said the writer, recalling the testimony of a wounded woman who said she was next to a burly man. At one point, when someone said that there was a chance to escape, this woman said: I can’t. And he said: fine, then I’ll stay with you. This fact of preferring the other to oneself is a very strong thing.

Not that the bombers weren’t interesting, explained Carrre: The fact that we now know well the springs of fanaticism is no longer a mystery, says Salah Abdeslam, the only survivor of the bombers: He says that the book of Islam should be read from the first page and not from the last. L actually said something important: we need to go back to our roots, back in time, to understand Islamic terrorism, because this great Islam actually exists which, at a turning point in history, is somehow deposed and we need to understand when it happened. But the trial was clearly not the place to delve into it. In any case, the most interesting thing for me was this collective narrative, this chorus that rises from the novel. I am happy to have been able to register his birth. But I must also say that the trial went very well, justice was respected. Therefore the last sentence of Nadia the mother of one of the victims: you did your job well.

The prize was also awarded to the translator Francesco Bergamasco, who was not present last night. Carrre thanked him: We write but translators are important because they allow us to meet, while shortly before to Eva Giovannini who hosted the evening he had said: Today I had a meeting on translation and I spent an hour talking about technicalities, such as commas and semicolons. It would be nice to have a world where you can focus on semicolons.