Author: Erri De Luca
Publishing house: Feltrinelli
Date of publication: 31-10-2023
In these 101 Neapolitan voices Erri De Luca grafts culture and history of an entire city and its inhabitants. He does so freely, moving from one word to the next in a seemingly random manner − “a schiovere”, as they say in Naples − in a daze-and yet everything holds together and becomes a tale: songs, films, poems, the smorfia, childhood and lifelong memories, linguistic curiosities and boys’ runs on the rain-slicked cobblestones.
“The Italian used in these pages for telling,” the author writes in the opening, “is added vocabulary, suited to my secluded nature. A slow language of flat words, it is opposed to the hasty other, of truncated words. Italian stood for me in books, silent, spacious, inland.
Neapolitan was harbor, laden with saltiness. Where Neapolitan flays, Italian relieves. I grew fond of it for shelter. Outside blew the Neapolitan from every cardinal point, inside the little book room was cove-shaped Italian. Thanks to the thickness of the shelves it also padded against the cold, ‘o fridd’.
Without coinciding they took turns, excluding themselves. But in these pages they go for the only time under arm.”
Accompanying the words and stories, which came out in the weekly column of the same name in the “Corriere del Mezzogiorno,” are Andrea Serio’s drawings. And each entry is a story to be discovered.