Piersandro Pallavicini: “Irony is the chemistry of writing”

The one of Piersandro Pallavicini it falls within the happily complicated lives of those who dedicate themselves by force or by love to two activities so distant as to impose two different business cards. On Google under his name “writer” comes out, but he dedicates most of his time to teaching inorganic chemistry as a full professor at the University of Pavia. Counting illustrious precedents, from Primo Levi to the musician Aleksandr Borodin, the reconfirmed discretion of this science with respect to literature and the arts is intriguing but not surprising.

The biography of Borodin written by Nina Berberova was translated into Italian with the beautiful title “Genius and regularity”. Can we meet again?

I wouldn’t put my hand in fire on genius. On regularity yes, even in writing. I tend towards Cartesian prose, avoiding the bel canto of the phrase and the imaginative temptations. I prefer the style of the scientist, who puts his discoveries on paper as clearly as possible. If we want to stay in literature, I’ll make Raymond Carver’s lesson my own. No tricks.

Do the chemistry teacher and the writer coexist well? How would you like to be remembered?

For both. When academic colleagues are interested in me as a writer I get angry, I would like to be considered only a good chemist. The same goes the other way around: if they call me to talk about the relationship between science and literature, on which everything has been said, however, I decline the invitation. Either one or the other.

What was the first passion between the two?

Chemistry was my childhood dream. I only discovered literature at university, before I devoured Wodehouse comics and books. Then the lighting thanks to the Culture Club column, which Pier Vittorio Tondelli kept in the monthly Rockstar. If instead I had to mention a book, just one of those that make you fall in love, I would say “Tell me when the train left” by James Baldwin.

In his latest novel “The director’s son”, published with Mondadori, the protagonist is a refined bookseller for bibliomaniacs who moves between the province and the Côte d’Azur, coming to terms with his dead but impending father. And he turned sixty. Like her.

There is in every novel a distillation of personal experience. I am experiencing the sixtieth year as a different passage from the others. From 40 to 50 he didn’t give me a whisker while today I feel the transition, as if the warranty date had expired, as if it were crossing a shadow line. Writing about it dilutes the fears and obsessions. The two themes of the book are loneliness, because my character no longer has anyone, and the disclosure of family secrets. Which, for my generation, were almost always placed in the biography of the fathers, where stories were hidden that you hadn’t imagined for a lifetime.

How much has the northern province changed compared to that of Piero Chiara, to Pietro Germi’s “Ladies & Gentlemen”?

It is much more nuanced: Pavia, Cremona, Mantua, Vigevano, Como dissolve in the metropolitan suburbs. The magnifying glass on local events has blurred and so has the desire to understand other people’s stories. The social fabric has mixed, families have dissolved in many elsewhere.

His literary identity is odd compared to current trends.

Why, is there a definite literary taste in Italy? The only obvious phenomenon seems to me to be the advent and seizure of power by detective stories and commissioners. Then on a smaller scale the success of pain as an added value of the story: bad luck and scary diseases seem more worthy of narration than pleasures and success. I find this fishing in troubled waters incorrect, as well as boring. I hope it disappears.

If there is, it means that the public is interested.

Maybe the exposure of pain is appreciated because it satisfies a certain sense of guilt. One feels responsibility towards the suffering of others and reading it becomes a way to dampen it. After that, once the book is closed, the majority give a damn about it.

Do you have a chemical antidote?

The irony. In books and in life it is the fundamental weapon of salvation, especially for those like me, as a disbelieving scientist, who think that one fine day it will all end. In the face of such disarming evidence, I prefer a smile to despair.

Borodin was happy when he didn’t go to the laboratory because of the flu and stayed at home to compose. How does she do?

I spend up to ten hours a day at university. So I take advantage of the weekends, the summer holidays and Christmas to write. They are my writing reserve.

Do you enjoy yourself more among chemists or writers?

I get less bored among chemists. If nothing else, science is talked about more than university gossip in academia. Among writers, with a few exceptions, literature is almost never discussed: it seems to be among those accountants who talk about the intrigues of the firm, the office manager, the career. When I’m at a literature festival, I stay alone and look for a good restaurant.

Do your students know that you write?

Yes, but I don’t advertise it, and I think first-year students don’t know it yet. Most learn it from the Internet.