Carlo Lucarelli is back. “Afraid huh?” The author of detective stories is at the Circolo dei Lettore today at 6.30 pm – in dialogue with the Turin writer Davide Longo – to present his Léon (Einaudi), natural continuation of Almost blue, bestseller of 1997.
Lucarelli, did you miss Inspector Grazia Negro?
«In reality Grazia also appears in Day after day e The dream of flyingand, but with Léon in fact the atmosphere of Almost blue, that same set of sensibilities and characters, such as the serial killer the Iguana, and especially Simone, the blind boy: I really missed him, at a certain point I felt I wanted to know him more deeply, to understand what he was happening “.
In Almost Blue’s time, literary detectives were all men, he pointed out. Grazia Negro was an exception: how much has the narrative changed in this sense?
“Very very much. Grazia was born with Lupo Werewolf in 1994 from a suggestion: I had been to the Imola police station for an interview and the manager was a woman, like women they were in charge of the archive and of the flying squad. Today it would be normal, but at the time I was amazed, even though the policewomen had been there since 1981. I thought then that I would know very well what to do if my character was a policeman, but I didn’t have the same clear ideas in the case of a woman. And when you don’t know what to do, that’s where the novel begins … ».
Speaking of evolutions, have you ever found yourself pondering whether to use asterisks or schwa in your novels?
«No, but it is a subject that we must face, understand, without obsessions. I happened to talk about it with a woman Major of the carabinieri. I asked you what the others called you, Madam Major? Maggiora? “No”, he explained to me: “The rank is Major, as General and Lieutenant”. So at the most, Mr. Maggiore, but then he said to me: “Uh look, the new tenentina has arrived”. This is to say that language has its own rules but then adapts to reality. Negro is an inspector, sometimes an inspector. I call it Grace. All the other graduates in the book are “doctor” or “doctor”. In short, I don’t ask myself the problem, I let it act and take its course ».
In Léon there are social networks and masks: contemporary elements that help or hinder the mystery writer?
«Both, it depends on the use. The novels on Grazia Negro are all very anchored in reality. I wanted to set Léon in the first lockdown, I liked the idea of a killer wandering around a deserted city like during a zombie epidemic. But then my taxi driver friend (the one I quote in the book) pointed out to me that they were going to catch him right away because there was no one around. So I gave up on that very connotative moment of the pandemic, which would have affected the plot too much, and I opted for the following months in which it is less intrusive and more in the background ».
You have dealt with Pasolini for a long time: now your first Roman house is up for auction, what effect does it have on you?
«Some places, like this one, are independent of being simply a home: they become opportunities and occasions, a bit like anniversaries, to get to know a writer better, they have to do with his memory. So I’m on the side of those who now want to protect their Roman home ».
Let’s talk about No Vax, their protests and especially their language: do you think fascism is really back?
“I don’t think he’s ever really gone. As I often say, fascism exists so it makes sense to be anti-fascist. But it is a serious matter, not nonsense, it has an ideological cultural historical dimension and must be (re) known otherwise it is chaos, like now. We got to the point that a guy with a bust of Mussolini in the house wears the uniform of the Jews in the concentration camps, without knowing anything about that story, and calls me a fascist, who brings the school kids visiting Auschwitz on the day. of Memory. Paradoxical. It is the drift, the fruit of ignorance ».
How do we stop it?
«I answer as a writer: with culture. We have to teach these people the meaning of words. ‘ –
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