Giorgio van Straten: “Against the risk of simplification”

“Dhopeless vitality ”, as Pier Paolo Pasolini defined it in a collection of poetry. Giorgio van StratenWhen asked to explain where the oxymoron that is the title of his latest novel comes from, he stops. A question. “Can I read some verses?” She asks in turn, declaiming Pasolini’s chosen lines over a telephone. «This is desperate vitality», he says later, «It is trying to do it while knowing that the attempt will be disappointed». Van Straten has no sadness in his voice. On the contrary, there is a garrulous note in his words. “It is the greatest teaching that America left me”, explains the writer, who from 2015 to 2019 was director of the Italian Cultural Institute in New York, “I found freshness in the relationship with things, I discovered how to deal with them with detachment. Fortunately, because the story of George », the paper George, who is to van Straten as Nathan Zuckerman was to Philip Roth,« It would have sounded pathetic otherwise ». Giorgio, not the writer but his alter ego, is the only protagonist of A desperate vitality (HarperCollins 2022, pp. 272, euro 18). «In the sensations he feels there is a lot of me. Being sixty in New York was an injection of freshness, of vitality. It was certainly very nice, but vitality collided with the flaws of being a little big, to put it mildly ». Thus, Giorgio, the paper George and with these, perhaps, the writer, has become dual, divided between impulses, sensations, environments and events of which A desperate vitality gives an account, with irony and lightness.

Donald Trump, the #MeToo, the Coronavirus. A desperate vitality it contains what is most striking in recent times. How was this book born?
“I started writing this book in my New York days. I think it was roughly two years after I arrived in July 2015. I started writing it live, just for fun. I reflected with an ironic eye on what I saw. To be honest, I didn’t know exactly where all this would lead me. “

And how, then, did it arrive at the finished form?
«Giorgio, who by intentions should have been a Virgil, capable of ferrying the viewer through New York environments, has taken substance. It was his aging of him, his physical flaws and, at the same time, his desire to stay young that shaped this story of mine ».

A story that culminates in the pandemic.
“In truth, there is only a quick hint of the Coronavirus. When the pandemic broke out, I had finished writing. It was a post-production phase, mine. I could have gone straight. However, I felt the need to hand me the problem. In the book, I described a world that was disappearing, a world that, today, no longer exists. The New York of my novel is no longer like this. Writing about it has taken on an unprecedented value, which was not intended. It has become a look back with nostalgia ».

The years of Covid-19 have brought culture to its knees. How to recover?
«Culture is made up of exchanges, of experiences. Culture means going to an exhibition, in a theater, it means being able to meet people with whom to exchange ideas. Despite the effort made to find alternative and distant ways of making culture, this has never happened again. There has been a consequent impoverishment of culture, on the creative front and on the economic front. Today, I think we need to get back to having the physicality of relationships. Because before writing, before art, there is experience, which is its irreplaceable engine ».

A desperate vitality contains a premise: the characters are inspired by real people. How many whims has he taken off with this trick?
«This is a challenge that I would leave to the reader. A desperate vitality is a self-fiction book, written by a person who tells himself. The protagonist is called Giorgio, he has an experience in New York, but it doesn’t exactly coincide with who I am. In fact, in the book, there is another Giorgio, president of the Italian Cultural Institute. The novel contains a presumption of reality, and I find this double game between fiction and reality to make reading very interesting ».

Yet, there are clear references, too, it seems, to the Elena Ferrante case and to the interference of journalism.
“I enjoyed making fun of myself and people who are my friends. Some have a public dimension, and are therefore recognizable. Others are ordinary people, of which I emphasize absurd, ridiculous traits. A bit like it The king is naked“.

And he also speaks of absurd traits in reference to the intellectual circles, Italian and American. How have you experienced them over the years?
«Giorgio, the Giorgio of the book, experiences a continuous form of fascination and repulsion towards these worlds: he would like to be the protagonist, but since he is not a fool he sees their absurd, ridiculous features. He sees the politically correct and there is annoyance for certain automatisms, certain clichés, for the renunciation of reasoning with one’s own head. Certain movements can start from sacrosanct assumptions, but, when they become normative, they take on dangerous connotations. He stopped considering the complexity of the world with due attention and he began to reduce everything to the present, to the impositions of the present ».

The famous level of Totò. Why did it go so far?
«I think that simplification is a universal risk, intrinsic to every era. Complexity is tiring. Confronting reality in all its facets, trying to understand people in their peculiarities is tiring. It is simpler to give oneself an identity that arises from community with others, to identify friends and adversaries, as has been done in recent days. We are witnessing the construction of the enemy that serves to affirm our identity: I don’t like that country, so it never existed ».

For an artist, trying to counter single thinking can become counterproductive, and Adele and JK Rowling, to name two, are prime examples.
«As Nanni Moretti would have said,“ Words are important ”. I don’t accept all this, I don’t accept that respect for those who feel fluid from the point of view of gender becomes so preceptive as to prevent me from being happy to be a man or a woman. I don’t accept it tout court, but above all I don’t accept it when it comes to art. Each of us should be free to say and do what he wants, and an artist should use his art to talk about what he likes most ».

Have you ever felt censored?
“No, but in my American days there was a huge controversy. A painter, a white woman, made a series of surgeries on an African American boy killed in the 1950s. She was challenged that as a white woman she had no right to express herself, to expose herself. And it was absurd. As an artist, I can do everything, talk about a Greenland Inuit. Then he may fail me, I can do it badly and be judged for it. But I cannot be reproached with the choice of a subject, just as a subject cannot give the measure of the value of a work ».