The Jordanian-Littell dialogue on the war. And then Veronesi, Trevi, Piperno: here is «la Lettura» – Corriere.it

Literature goes everywhere and describes every panorama, whether it is the atavistic fears embodied in fairy tales or the conflict that is fought before our eyes: many writers meet or tell other writers and other literary visions in the new issue of «la Lettura», #593, from Saturday 8 April in preview on the App and from Sunday 9 on the newsstand.

Opening the issue is the extensive interview by Paul Jordan, the Strega prize who signed his report from the Ukrainian front on 21 February in the special in the Corriere della Sera, to his colleague Jonathan Littell: the French naturalized American writer who with The benevolent ones (Einaudi, 2007) won the Goncourt prize and became a literary case with its protagonist, Max Aue, an officer of the Nazi SS. The two narrators confront each other, during a meeting in Barcelona, on the topic of the war in Ukraine, a country that Littell knows well after years of acquaintance (he left it at the beginning of the war and is writing a novel set there), and they retrace the events of Eastern Europe, the Russian expansion policies, the point of view “of those he is wrong» and his way of thinking, nationalisms: and so they also cross the other conflicts that Europe has felt more distant but which resembled this war, even in the ferocious methods of aggression. Whether it’s Chechnya or Ukraine, Littell says, it’s not true that one gets used to such horror: “The artillery scares me much more now than it did twenty years ago.”

A world that seemed fully understood and fully known, the contemporary one: instead it turned out to be unknown and dangerous, amidst crises, conflicts, pandemics, global dramas that are reflected in various ways in personal dramas. Sandro Veronesi has read the book by Ian McEwan Lessons
(Einaudi) and tells in «la Lettura» how the whole story of a character, but also of the United Kingdom and the West, unrolls in the novel-monument (over 570 pages). A story that, through the life of the protagonist Roland Baines, narrates childhood and history, loss and obsession, breathes the air breathed at the time of the Twin Towers, Brexit or the assault on the Capitol by Donald’s followers Trump.

There are also stories that humanity has been telling itself since it was born, different from novels and mysteriously necessary to convey the experience of life: the fables. It reminds us Emmanuel Trevi, taking the opportunity of the release of the book by Nicholas Jubber, The storytellers. A journey into the secret history of fairy tales and their authors (Bompiani): built with fixed structures (identified by the linguist Vladimir Propp), they are oral stories that cross the centuries undeterred. And that today they are an “endangered species”, as Trevi recalls and as Jubber maintains: they run the risk of being flattened by the influence of moralism and the spread of politically correct.

Many other authors met or reviewed in the supplement. Among them, a classic who distilled his obsessions and disillusionments in novels and short stories, Francis Scott Fitzgerald: Writer Alessio Turin reflects on the collection of three of his short stories or “novelettes” proposed by the publisher Feltrinelli (The Diamond as Big as the Ritz and Other Stories, in bookstores from April 11), returning the portrait of a writer pursued by passions and weaknesses and capable of narrating them with incisive narrative precision. The incipit of Fitzgerald’s volume, edited by Franca Cavagnoli, can be read today in the Theme of the Day of the «La Lettura» App.

The «la Lettura» App for smartphones and tablets (downloadable from the App Store and Google Play) offers subscribers the new issue as a preview on Saturdays, the archive with all the releases since 2011 and the Theme of the Day, a digital-only daily extra. Subscribing costs 3.99 euros per month or 39.99 per year, with one week free. The subscription can also be subscribed from the desktop starting from this page. For subscribers, the contents are also visible from PCs and Macs starting from their Profile page. Furthermore, a one-year subscription to the App can be given as a gift via the web from here or by purchasing a Gift Card in Librerie.coop.

The issue of the cultural supplement closes with another portrait «from writer to writer»: Alessandro Piperno talks about an author like Nicola Chiaromonte, who was a philosopher, politician, critic, thinker, anti-fascist and anti-communist, for a long time little frequented by public debate, already returned to readers with the recent Meridiano Mondadori (The critical spectator2021) and now re-proposed in the Mondadori Oscars with his best-known work, To believe and not to believe (in bookstores from 11 April): a precious opportunity to recall his literary loves and political indignations.