“The esprit of Naples captures the French”. Interview with writer Philippe Vilain

Convinced, like Pino Daniele and several of us, that Naples has a thousand colors, Philippe Villain thus entitled – ‘Mille couleurs de Naples’ – his penultimate book, almost a love letter to a city by which French intellectuals are perhaps more seduced than others. So much to make it, like Jean-Noël Schifano, constant inspiration of his own narrative production or to go there to live as in the case of Vilain, a prolific man of letters who also inspired cinema and theater. It is a cultural empathy that is also useful for
diplomacy after certain periodic political storms. This was testified by the visit of the head of state, Sergio Mattarella, for the inauguration of the ‘Naples à Paris’ exhibition at the Louvre Museum together with the French president Emmanuel Macron.

Meanwhile, Vilain does not leave out the stronger, and even darker, colors of the Neapolitan prism, publishing the novel for Gremese (which has also translated his other works).Pupetta‘, centered on the true story of Assunta Maresca, the Camorra lady who disappeared two years ago and media star of the last fifty years of the last century, told in films and TV dramas already when she was alive.

You, French from Rouen, wrote: “I’ve never been to Naples, I’ve been back”. What does she mean she?
Naples is the city I’ve been waiting for in my life. I could not explain why I immediately felt at home there or why I quickly fraternized with the Neapolitans. But there is no doubt that I have found in this people the human qualities that I love: solidarity and authenticity. I absolutely agree with Luciano De Crescenzo when he said that Naples is the last hope
of humanity.

Since sometimes coincidences also count, Naples has played a useful role with the exhibition at the Louvre in relations between Paris and Rome after the recent tensions. What does this city represent for the French?

It occupies an increasingly important place in the heart of the French. There is a strong desire to explore the Neapolitan city and culture, especially in music and painting. There is a desire to walk in the places of Caravaggio and in those where the voices of castrated singers like Farinelli still resound. And then, Naples is attractive because it resists globalization and introduces to
its cultural authenticity in an exciting and baroque way.

You mention music and painting. The impression is that French readers, despite the multiplication of translated Italian authors in recent years, can draw even more from our literature.

French readers read their own literature a lot, perhaps because its rich history, combined with a large current output, makes one less interested than one should in foreign fiction.

What are your favorite Italian books?
‘Boredom’ by Moravia, ‘La bella estate’ by Pavese, ‘If this is a man’ by Primo Levi, ‘Ragazzi di vita’ and ‘Petrolio’ by Pasolini.

Why did you want to write the story of Pupetta Maresca?

It’s one of the first ones they told me when I settled in the city: a novel story, so incredible as to represent a gift for a writer. Beyond the moral evaluations, Pupetta for her tragic character is not very different, in my eyes, from certain Greek heroines such as Medea, Electra or Antigone: a young woman who does not submit, victim of an injustice, who does not hesitate to sacrifice oneself to wash away shame and save honour.

Pupetta leapt to fame when very young and pregnant, she avenged the death of her husband, a guappo from the fruit and vegetable market, by killing his killer.

This woman sends us back to an insoluble dilemma: she commits murder, the most reprehensible act of all, but she does it out of fidelity to love by sacrificing part of her life. It is an unconditional gesture and she is the heroine who in a sort of transcendence becomes a great novel character, paradoxically endowed with her own ideal of justiceto.

We could hardly imagine her born in Cuneo or Rovigo. She almost inevitably seems the daughter of the Parthenope siren.

She is a powerful incarnation of the Neapolitan people, with a strong, passionate character, a character of excess and irrationality, a spontaneous madonna without calculation, who fears nothing and nobody. She doesn’t let others dictate the law. Yes, to some extent you mirror Naples itself, which despite the many foreign dominations has not allowed itself to be subdued. Pupetta come Napoli forces us to redefine the ordinary and Manichean representation of Good versus Evil, of good versus evil. There is no longer a relationship between opposites, but an associative relationship of incestuous complementarity. Good with Evil.

However, in literature, in recent times, Naples is represented in abundance by a corresponding production of detective stories.

It is a more general problem to which I have dedicated two essays: ‘La passion d’Orphée’ and ‘La littérature sans idéal’. It tends more and more to
marketing, also in France. Anyone who has a story thinks that’s enough to be a writer.

Like Céline, do you say that style makes a writer?

Surely. A good story is not enough. Everyone has it. What matters is the way you tell it. It is the way that literature does.