Giorgio Bassani, self theorist

GIORGIO BASSANI, INTERVIEWS 1955-1993. (Feltrinelli, page 404, Euro 25.00).
'' So-called author books are not popular in Italy, because they are generally not meant to be popular. Is it good? Is it bad? Maybe it's bad. But popularity cannot be a purpose. When it occurs it is always a gift, a prize not sought ''. He, Giorgio Bassani, was one of the intellectuals who in Italy had the greatest chance of affecting the cultural fabric of the country thanks to his popularity and his flair for the popularity of others. Successful novelist, infallible ability as a publisher, screenwriter, poet, Rai deputy editor, politician, founder of Italia Nostra, a man capable of combining the gift for what he called "poetry" in multiple forms.
"I have enough confidence in my taste, and in the almost physical reaction that causes the presence of poetry in me. Poetry, Barenson said, always produces in us a sort of increase in vitality ". A feeling he had felt, he says, when he had read the first pages of that manuscript that Elisa Croce, Benedetto's daughter, had recommended to him.
It was Il Gattopardo by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, a masterpiece but also an extraordinary editorial success indeed. Bassani then - here in the role of editor for Feltrinelli - had immediately understood that it was an incomplete book but the author was by now dead and then he had climbed on the train to Sicily and tried to recover the missing parts from the rioting widow.
Of poetry he tells Walter Pedullà in an interview in 1960 while at L'Express in 1962 he explains that in that book "for the first time Italian readers, from all over Italy, could read a non-dialect novel that expressed the pessimism of all of Italy, their pessimism. The Leopard has deflated a century of national literature. The Italians applauded their defeat ". We read in this wonderful book just published by Feltrinelli that collects the Interviews, or rather the words that Giorgio Bassani gave to others about his work between 1955 and 1993, in highly significant fragments. So much so that in the introduction Domenico Scarpa tells how desperate his friends Claudio Varese and Mario Soldati were, that he did not write those reflections so lucid that he did, but only by voice, about his own work and that of others. There are as many fascinating interlocutors, such as Manlio Cancogni, Enzo Siciliano, Aldo Rosselli, Ferdinando Camon and many others with whom it is measured in these pages that give the impression of a voice in direct contact.
Bassani had no time for reflecting evidently he preferred doing, just as he never entered into controversy, to whom for example he asks him about the attacks of the Group 53 he never wants to reply, glissa arguing ferociously that he will speak to us when they write something, that they are childish . In short, extraordinary pages that bring us alive in an Italian reality in which the cultural debate and the social and political debate were closely intertwined in the doctrine of doing. '' I write only to give testimony of me and my truth. Now I have this theme in mind, but at some point it's not me, it's the very character who comes forward, who decides to be written '' and also, from his voice, told.
(HANDLE).