Gilda Policastro is a writer and literary critic.
She curates the Bottega della poesia for the newspaper La Repubblica and is the editor of the site L e parole e le cose .
She teaches poetry at the Molly Bloom school and literature and law at the Luiss-Guido Carli University of Rome.
She has published the novels Il drug (210), Sotto (2013) and Cella (2015), books of poetry including Non come vita (2013) and Inattuali (2016), Essays of theory and criticism including Sanguineti (2009) and Polemiche literary . From " Novissimi "ai lit-blog (2012).
Title:The Distinction
Publisher: Giulio Perrone publisher - 14 March 2023
Softcover 194 pages
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Being gripped by pain is a daily practice for anyone. Giving light words to pain is a difficult project. And Gilda Policastro not only succeeds: this is her language"
Luke Sossella
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Publisher: La Nave di Teseo, 2021, pp. 208
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rights: rt.vivian@gmail.com
Literary Awards
The Jury of Viareggio-Rèpaci Prize has chosen the three finalists - all female - for the narrative:
The lost bread by Edith Bruck (The ship of Theseus), The part of Malvasia by Gilda Policastro (The ship of Theseus) and Adoration by Alice Urciuolo (66thand2nd).
Sinopsis
Who is Malvasia? A woman who comes from no one knows where and who lives in the village as a "foreigner": cultured, nonconformist, eccentric, she has been seen taking a long walk and from that moment on her all traces have been lost. When she is found dead, the passionate murder is thought of and the investigations begin, entrusted to Marshal Arena and his assistant Gippo. In the succession of testimonies and hypotheses, investigators and suspects begin to get confused, in a whirlwind of voices that fades and delivers all the protagonists to the same changing identity. The yellow of death becomes the gray of the lives of individuals mortified in their ambitions and revealed in their contradictory and elastic natures, in the common ability to experience opposite feelings and to perform unthinkable actions. As in Greek tragedy, the human surpasses himself in the extreme, but in modern tragedy one dies without a reason and without a culprit. This new novel by Gilda Policastro challenges the great classics of non-crime literature: the question about the murderer becomes the investigation carried out inside the most secret room of conscience, where imagination and cruelty, violence and tenderness are part of the same root . From the principle of generation to that of de-generation, the stories that revolve around the vine that is Malvasia resemble a broken puzzle, whose pieces do not fit together. As in life.
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"Gilda Policastro is in her fourth novel and in this last test she scores a stroke as a thoroughbred narrator: pretending to want to start an investigation into a dead woman and stage a theater of voices that chorally tell more lives, in coherence with the reference of the title to the vine. One death and many lives, because "the dead man is not a dead man but death": almost never an exceptional event, as in a crime, but an expected and fatal moment, especially in its imminence after a diagnosis. This part of Malvasia also tells it by weaving the narrative with quotations and cultured references (from the Gadda of the Cognition of pain to the Beckett of Krapp's Last Tape), but its power is not in this. Rather, in the oscillation of consciousness (of which the page returns the flow) from the lucid awareness of fragility to the darkness into which the gaps of meaning such as illness precipitate it. The theme, already dear to the author in the debut of the drug, is faced here with a new, more painful humanity: in the relationship between Malvasia and her dying mother we find contrasts ("the outer boundary of clothes and the introjected one of prohibitions" ) and even worse the unspoken ones of the closest mesh of social life, the family, a paroxysmal and oxymoronic place of pain and care. One of the most beautiful pages of the book is dedicated to the pseudo-etymological reconstruction of the dialect verb cuttuniare: to protect, set up a kennel, but also to force, hold back, suffocate. The part of Malvasia is a book to be read not all in one breath, as is often said of novels, but aloud: to appreciate the rhythm, the nutrients of writing, from minute perceptions to pseudo-sentences ("Mother is the especially dissatisfaction "). ... " Roman Petri, writer
22/04/2021 10:57:59
I opened the book I just bought and couldn't stop reading it until I finished it. A very unique experience: voices chased each other in my head and produced swirling images, as if I was involved in this "detective / non-detective" (wonderfully well written), as if I was involved in the scene and even in the first person. responsibility. I don't know how the author managed to keep her prose firmly without giving way. Finally, there remains a suspended atmosphere, I know that I will read it several times to better measure myself with its complexity. Well done.
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There is the crime but the real mystery is in the language
It begins that resembles a classic thriller: the apartment where the woman - found dead - had come to live in the village, eccentric and lonely (the "foreigner"). From there the police investigation - Commissioner Arena, assistant Gippo (real protagonist: a little bit of an old TV drama and a little bit of Gaddi's Ingravallo) - minutes and interrogations, listening to the suspects and witnesses (her lovers, employers, family members). Then "suddenly, suddenly, ex abrupto" (adverbial triad used here) The part of Malvasia by Gilda Policastro (The ship of Theseus) becomes another book, indeed many other books: philosophical meditation on the mystery of evil, intimate diary , reportage ("Naples when you get there from the highway seems like a horizontal spread of concrete: the buildings do not stand out, rather they all struggle to stay there"), crime news (femicide), memory of the subsoil, X-ray of the Body (perverse or in decay) ...
Now, these innumerable books, which "all struggle to fit in", eventually come together not in a linear plot but in a unitary structure? Perhaps yes, but the laborious schedule of the novel asks a lot from the reader, who will have to reconstruct the puzzle of narrative fragments (juggling literary quotations) and to the investigation on Malvasia he will have to add another and more demanding one, about himself and about its "part of Malvasia".
The hybridization of genres is reflected in the linguistic mixture: idiom of social networks, sophisticated vocabulary («pergiunge death»), bureaucratese, terminology of perversions («fist»), dialect («cuttuniare»: take care). The point of view changes continuously: third person, first person, second person, with a slight alienating effect, while the syntax expands to virtuosity (pages without a period) and then contracts into aphoristic sentences. The theme of the book is the disturbing contiguity between pleasure and pain: they court each other, and it is not known when the pathology begins. But a possible red thread of the whole narrative is irony, a natural playful disposition, comedy linked to the body, and which explodes from the recognition of the ambiguous character of reality ("the evidence is not the same for everyone"), a distracted lightness in the precise report on horror, stories of terminal illnesses alongside stories of horns. Speaking of Gippo (who has a dwarf father, a sick mother and a friend named Gippa!), The schizoid identity must be added to the identities mentioned above: «I'm not Gippo, I feel Gippo». Investigating the crime he comes to identify with the victim, to fall in love with him. His catabasis in the "psychic undifferentiated" (made up of scraps, scratches, garbage) leads him into a dark, indistinct area: he is both man and woman (even Malvasia sometimes dressed as a man), both victim and tormentor.
Yes, literature is "the greatest lie that man has invented", as it is stated here (Malvasia wrote short stories). But it is a lie that must be told well, and for this reason it cannot draw on other literature but on our experience - visceral, affective - of the world. In Gippo everything is improbable except psychology, and an unavoidable destiny. If the characters in the book were only verbal concretions, ghosts of a free and limitless imagination, they would bore us. And instead they come to life precisely because they rashly question the demons - ours and the author's. The reader could also get lost in the "void on the border between life and death" evoked here, or in Gippo's sadomasochistic fantasies. But then the tone of the narrative begins to make a mockery of the old aunts ("how serious you got!"), And relies on popular irony embodied in a joke ("a full of suffering that half was enough"). The novel's catchphrase is the inspector's warning: "Never leave anything tempted." Yes, what good is "groped" to deepen the truth? At the bottom there is only - in Leopardi's way - nothing. From that "undifferentiated psychic" the comedian can only be born, right Gippo?
Filippo La Porta-