Your story “Tortoiseshell” draws on a controversy about Giuseppe Trevisani, who, in his Italian translation of Ernest Hemingway’s “The First Forty-nine Stories,” from 1947, is known to have taken liberties with Hemingway’s style and, in some spots, to have mistranslated the original. What inspired you to use Trevisani as a framework for your story?
I first read Hemingway’s story “Cat in the Rain” in 1961, and it was Trevisani’s version. I liked it very much. Many years later, when I realized that there was an error in Trevisani’s translation, it was like discovering that somebody you love has been lying to you—but, also, that it was their very lies that made you fall in love with them. “Tortoiseshell” was born from this short circuit between mistranslation and lie. The first draft dates to 2003, but the story was completed ten years later, in 2013. Perhaps it was also influenced by the current widespread tendency to replace expressions like “my point of view,” “my version of events,” “my hypothesis,” “my theory,” “my fantasies,” and “my lies” with “my narrative.” Today, everything is generically referred to as having a “narrative,” even—rightly or wrongly—science and mathematics.
The story itself is about telling lies and about telling stories, and where these two things intersect in the life of a boy named Aldo. The ability to tell a riveting story, to hold an audience’s attention, is a real talent, and your character is clearly talented at it. Where does he go wrong?
Aldo is a special kind of liar. He lies for the pleasure of lying. His enjoyment is so great that he can’t stop even after he realizes that, when reality sweeps the lie away, the consequences are devastating. He is certainly a talented liar, but his flaw is that he uses his skill to soften or even erase the harshness and disorder of reality. Aldo fabricates fragile illusions that seem beneficial—until they shatter.
Why is it so important to Aldo to tell his stories? It seems to be less about the stories themselves than it is about having others listen to them and believe them.
Nabokov, as we know, created a brilliant metaphor for literature. He said that it begins when a child runs out of the valley crying, “Wolf, wolf!” In fact, there is no wolf. Put that way, the game sounds easy; like most games, it’s anything but. To enjoy the game, the child must be sure that, at that moment, there is no wolf. On the other hand, if he doesn’t believe that the wolf really is on his heels, his cry will not be convincing, and the game will never work. In short, the theme is the wolf, but, if the cry is not perfectly executed, the game of literature fails. And it can be perfectly executed only if the reality of the wolf—though absent—is alive and present in the cry. If you get the cry wrong, you just get cute porcelain wolves that scare no one.
Do you ever think of your own stories as majolica cats? Is there a possibility that they may shatter?
Always. Making porcelain cats is a perfectly respectable activity; it requires skill, and one should ultimately feel satisfied at having made a porcelain cat. But the goal of writers—somewhat crazy, in many ways—is for their contraptions made of words, even if they’re lopsided, or lacking harmony, or perhaps especially if they’re lopsided and lacking harmony, to work not as porcelain but thanks to a miraculous spark of real life. Naturally, failure is almost always certain, but trying every time—that, yes, is thrilling.
Did you, like Aldo, read Hemingway’s stories as a young man? Did they have an effect on you or your work?
Yes. But my sympathy for Hemingway’s public persona didn’t last long. And I went through long periods during which I was barely interested in some of his works, especially “For Whom the Bell Tolls,” which had thrilled me as a young man. But my admiration for “The First Forty-nine Stories” has remained, especially the short and very short stories in the collection. I like their leanness and their swiftness. They were an unobtainable mirage for anyone who wanted to learn to write, and they still are.
It was important to you to have this story translated into English now. Why was that? Is there a connection between “Tortoiseshell” and your new novel (forthcoming in English in August), “The Old Man by the Sea”?
These are the only two texts of mine that explicitly reference Hemingway, so I thought it would be nice if both were published in English. ♦
(Starnone’s responses were translated, from the Italian, by Michael Reynolds.)
