Prose must adapt to the language necessary for the world it has created

How should characters in novels speak? It is the oldest puzzle of literature, and in particular of Italian-speaking literature, which for centuries did not have a nation within which to circulate speakers. Manzoni’s example

How should the characters speak? It is the oldest puzzle of literature, and in particular of Italian-speaking literature, which for centuries did not have a nation within which to circulate speakers. The first solution for a naive storyteller is that the characters must speak as one really speaks, a corollary of the cliché according to which the characters are real people, come from who knows what ravines to tease the otherwise sleeping author, to whom they assign the task of letting them live. Bales. If you unwrap a conversation overheard on a train to turn it into text, you don’t get who knows what epiphany but an incoherent and sloppy verbalization, enough to make any novel close out of boredom and despair. Counter-proof: the Italian novelists who today best reproduce the passage of the spoken word in their prose – Paolo Nori and Ugo Corniato name two – they obtain this effect with a shrewd and refined stylistic device which, if you used it verbatim speaking to your acquaintances, they would take you for a moron.