 |
Stephano
di Marino |
At a recent launch of a friend's book
an expert on the subject said that in Italy we are seeing the emergence
of a ‘school' of adventure
story writers who prefer exotic settings to the urban backdrops that
are currently being done to death. They are novelists who are reluctant
to reproduce the stereotype of the ‘police chief with the human face'
which brought Camillieri success, but which, in its many guises,
is in danger of turning into a cliché just like the Mike Hammer
big tough.
Since a large portion of my output
is in that ‘adventure' vein and
has been for many years, I have been wondering first if that was
true and, secondly, why some Italian authors felt they needed this ‘exoticism'.
It is easy to say ‘yes' to the first question. Apart from myself
I can count many other writers who have chosen that route. Giancarlo
Narciso, Andrea Carlo Cappi, Gianfranco Nerozzi, Alfredo Colitto,
Pino Caccucci, to mention only the best known. Well known? Not all
of them, and not by their names. Cappi, Narciso, Nerozzi and I scored
flattering successes thanks to serials published in Segretissimo – a
famous 1960s magazine specializing in spy novels – which we used
to sign with foreign pen-names required by the publisher. It is only
quite recently – and this proves my initial thesis – that the Italian
writer's career and that of his ‘foreign' alter ego have tended to
converge and the novels sold on news-stands in the popular series
have even been republished – in revised editions – under the name
of their creator. Segretissimo was and still is an excellent
school for anyone who likes this type of adventure story. And it
cannot be said that the work of that Foreign Legion of Italians – who,
like the real Foreign Legion, also give up their names – is a servile
imitation of De Villiers's success, to give just one example. Spy
novels that are almost left-wing, and definitely marred by a certain
anarchism that is a feature of the mind of every genuine expatriate.
And in my view that is the heart of the matter. The wish to take
off and seek out settings and characters different from those we
are offered by the fiction promoted on television or in the little
novels with literary pretensions that make up our crime
novel scene (pace some of my colleagues, but that's how it is) exists
in the anarchic spirit of those who do not feel at home here and
maybe not abroad either, who find something that suits them and remain
forever foreigners in foreign lands. But with determination. Recalling
the Italian colonial past is almost a paradox. Too much time has
elapsed and the heroes of that handful of authors seldom visit places
that were the site of imperial-fascist occupation. We prefer the
far east, eastern Europe, South America, places we have been to personally
but which each of us probably visited a long while ago through that
imagination cultivated in adventure novels. The wish to swap the
everyday life we dislike for a mythical place which, perhaps subsequently,
destroys every dream, these are the features common to this ‘school'
that is still to come to full maturity but really does exist. The
Italy that is all around us has changed too, no denying it. In 1989
I wrote my first novel Per il sangue versato [For
the blood shed], which was set in a Milan Chinatown recreated
with a big dose of imagination, and I enhanced its scarcely noticeable
exotic features. Today, 16 years later, I am returning, with an episode
of my character, Il Professionista [The
Professional], to a truly multi-ethnic
Milan, which is more like those cities to which my imagination travelled
during those years. And do you want to know about the latest one?
MB92F (which
will be published in Segretissimo in 2007) is story that
is more exotic and with more action than many others set all over
the world. And in its way it is a tease.
