Write or stop writing. This is the problem in literary Italy

Ours is a country of beginners who strongly want to make their debut, and then it takes them an entire bibliography to stop. Maybe Manganelli was right: writers secretly want to be read by God himself

“It could be the last novel I write, I don’t know. I think about it every time,” he said a few weeks ago Andrew DeCarlo to Ansa about his very recent “I, Jack and God” (La nave di Teseo) shortly before getting bogged down in a series of considerations as a numerologist sister-in-law much less interesting than the declaration itself, which is teeming with profound meanings. Write, don’t write: Italy is a country of beginners who strongly want to make their debut, and then it takes them an entire bibliography to stop. Calvino was right when he ruled that “the first book should never have been written”, and not only because it’s almost always a monument to flaws mistaken for the prefiguration of your strengths, but because, once you’ve started, putting the cork back on seems impossible.