Erri de Luca: “I am the typical purebred reader who ignores the writer”

Erri de Luca (Naples, 1950) did not leave home slamming the door, but she did so without warning. When they told him that his father had torn his shirt, it seemed to him that this behavior connected with the Jewish religion, in which he is interpreted as a gesture of mourning. “Although my father was not a Jew”, clarifies the writer, who then “did not know what freedom was”, no matter how much he believed it at that time. His new book life size (Seix Barral), is motivated by the parent-child relationships that have shaped the cultural tradition of the West and, how could it be otherwise, is crossed by religions.

“The noise, although I didn’t hear it, was etched in my memory,” confessed the author of Fish don’t close their eyes at the press conference for the presentation of his book with the Spanish media. His father’s torn shirt is nothing less than “the mobile of these pages”, recognized the author himself in the work. It is not only for that his “most personal book”according to the point of Elena Ramirezpublisher of Seix Barral, the label that for years has been in charge of the works of the “poet of secular spirituality”, as the collaborator of El Cultural Álvaro Guibert called him.

life size is, on this occasion, a work in prose that also returns to its years of political activism. The one who was a Fiat operator and built his house with his own hands, from which he answers questions from journalists this Thursday, was in his youth a militant of Lotta Continua, a far-left group that sought to overthrow the Christian Democracy of Giulio Andreotti during the italian years of lead (70s and 80s of the 20th century).

[Erri de Luca: “La literatura describe la vida, depende del lector elegir qué lado tomar”]

If in the Balkan War he drove trucks to supply food to the Serbian people, this time makes trips to Ukraine with a friend “carrying the goods they ask us for” with a van. De Luca’s commitment is beyond question when it comes to his work. In reality, moreover, he was on the verge of spending five years in prison for demonstrating against the construction of a high-speed train line in a valley in the Italian Alps. “If my opinion is a crime, I will not stop committing it,” he would say in 2015.

Of all the links between parents and children that De Luca establishes in this book through philosophy, art, religion, history or mythology, the daughter of the war criminal who gives up reproducing to stop the malignant transmission It connects with his political activity, decisive in his life. It is just one of those extreme stories of the father-son relationship, which arise from a commission from a museum to write about one of his works.

“The sacrifice of Isaac is the most dramatic moment in the history of father-son relationships”

The father, pictorial work of the Russian expressionist Marc Chagall, is the trigger for this compendium of narrations, sometimes tales or stories, sometimes pure reflections on humanism, culture and life itself. The author takes advantage of the text dedicated to Chagall’s painting to delve into an iconic scene from the Old Testament. Isaac’s sacrifice not consummated by his father, Abraham, is “the most dramatic moment in the history of father-son relationships”, adds De Luca. And he clarifies that the representation of the legend by the painters is not faithful to the Bible: “Abraham was not a great man, but an old man, and Isaac was strong, but he accepts being tied up out of respect for his father” .

On the relationship with his father and his childhood, treated with his usual narrative mastery in his new book, the author expressed himself with a certain nostalgia and gratitude for a human legacy that today articulates a good part of his personality. “At home he never talked about money problems. The economy was not buoyant, but we never lacked for anything. A) Yes, I have indifference to merchandise. I have no desire to buy anything”, he assures. On the other hand, “from my father I inherited the intimate relationship with the mountains”, since he belonged to the alpinist infantry in World War II.

[Erri de Luca se enfrenta a lo ‘Imposible’]

Despite the fact that “I was a docile son throughout my childhood, with a closed character,” he explains, “I rejected what my father wanted, that I study a career”, and so he left the family home. However, he does not forget that in his family “they were great readers.” Thus, “I grew up in a room full of my father’s books.” It was “the warmest and quietest, full of that insulating material that books are”, evokes De Luca, who considers that The Quijote is the most important book in modern literature and has a copy of Lament for Ignacio Sánchez Mejíasof Lorca, in his house.

Asked about the references that this book could have beyond the Bible, which he himself translated into Italian, he denies the method. “The facets of reading and writing are two non-communicating vessels” for the author, who considers himself “the typical purebred reader who ignores the writer”. At the same time he feels “a responsibility before the time of the readers”that is, “I don’t want to bore you”.

It was inevitable to ask him about Giorgia Meloni’s latest electoral success in his country. In her leftist past, “I never would have even imagined that I would reach the age I am now,” she jokes, but about the fact that she is running as the new president “It is much better to have this defect of imagination”. Continuing with international politics, doubts that the nuclear weapon that Putin boasts will materialize in a military action. He considers that “it is more of a publicity campaign that aims to scare Europe and a threat that weighs on Western public opinion.”

The last text of life size refers, precisely, to one of the great assassinations of the 20th century. It is the story of pediatrician Henryk Goldszmit in the summer of 1942, which Janusz Korczak had chosen as the writer’s name. This character, one of the most moving in the book, never married, he was not a father, but he did it together with two hundred children in a train car that would take them to Treblinka, which was the same as saying hell. Death in a gas chamber awaited them. “No one ever called him dad,” but “in the depths of inhumanity, simple humanity dazzles like a bolt of lightning,” he concludes. As De Luca as always; more personal than ever.

Erri de Luca: “I am the typical purebred reader who ignores the writer”