Between the 2015 Paris Climate Conference, which was held shortly after the jihadist attack in the Bataclan hall, and the summit taking place these days in Dubai, barely eight years have passed. Paolo Giordano (Turin, 40 years old) looks at this recent past with one eye of a historian and another of an intimate narrator who recounts a succession of crises, collective and personal, and merges them to end up diving into the footprint of the atomic bomb. Along the way, the characters and plots of Tasmania (Tusquets) are spinning a novel about a world that is about to end and a completely new one, which is already around the corner with all its threats. Giordano, author of The solitude of prime numbers, an editorial phenomenon that he published at the age of 26, speaks with EL PAÍS by videoconference. He is a theoretical physicist, he says that he has a foundational relationship with the image of the mushroom cloud and with that, with an idea of apocalypse in the background, his story begins.
Ask. Why did you resort to that narrative device?
Answer. My initial purpose was to make fun of this idea of permanent crisis, because it has already become a rule to go from one crisis to another. Falling into one crisis after another has a lot to do with the perception of the crisis, which is the fact of being very connected to what is happening in the world through technology. There is always a crisis that marks us and this is an issue of perception in recent years. Some know how to manage this type of media bombardment very well, but I manage it very poorly, because my mind is like that, it goes from one end of the world to another. So at some point I was like, ‘Okay, we can find a way to make fun of this moment.’ And it’s one of the reasons why the first part of the book is called In case of apocalypse.
Q. At the beginning there are two events that mark the narrative: the Paris COP and the attack on the Bataclan hall. They are part of our recent past, but in this perception of the permanent crisis they seem like remote memories.
R. In writing Tasmania, which dates back six, seven or eight years ago, I had the very clear impression of writing a kind of historical novel and, in fact, I used techniques typical of a historical novel. I reviewed my personal files, my photos, emails, chats to understand what we were like at that moment, which was the day before yesterday… And so the perception of the passage of time also changes, everything seems further away and more remote. As I wrote, starting from the Paris Climate Conference and moving forward month after month, I believed that at some point Greta Thunberg would appear. And no, she never arrived, because she arrived in 2018. Very recent, of course, but according to our perception she has been there for at least 10 years.
Q. He has said that he followed a historical novel technique, but at the same time Tasmania It is an intimate novel. What did you want to question?
R. I am interested in this dynamic balance. Or dynamic imbalance. It is something that goes in two directions. On the one hand, the global world becomes intimate at times. And perhaps we have not yet understood that we are increasingly global in our concerns and anxieties, not only in consumption. We have analyzed a lot of globalized society economically, in consumption, in culture, but we have not reasoned much about the fact that we are a globalized humanity in concerns and the way in which this filters into the most intimate manifestations of our life. The pandemic changed the way we made love. And the Bataclan changed the way we go to a concert.
Q. And the other direction?
R. The opposite direction is how our intimate history, our personal sphere, our advancing life modifies what we considered our objective opinions about the world.
Q. This addresses the issue of truth. In October she wrote in Il Corriere della Sera, Regarding Gaza, the truth always arrives a moment late and, when it hits the ground, it evaporates.
R. Now what I wrote even seems optimistic to me, because the truth doesn’t come often anymore.
Q. What relationship do you, as a narrator, have with the truth?
R. It is a very clear relationship. That is, for me, the novel, writing is a way of getting to tell the truth and often that happens through the reinvention of reality. That was always like that for me. The purpose, the true vocation of literature is to say what is true. And doing so, necessarily, by reinventing the world, at least in part. Today the crisis of truth has to do, paradoxically, with the world of information. The world that we associate with factual truth is, on the contrary, the one that at this moment seems disoriented in the face of its transmission and verification. On the other hand, it is as if the novel always had that path open, because it tries to tell the truth about being here.
Q. But that is not necessarily a historical truth.
R. Above all, it is a truth to which we all have an instinct that still works. While we have difficulties with factual truth, feeling that a story is true, in a story, is a faculty that still exists within us.
Q. Are you worried about factual reality becoming narrated reality, a story, especially on social media?
R. The years of the novel are also years of explosion of social networks, of direct testimony, Twitter… Look where we have come, but at that moment it really seemed that direct testimony could displace respectable journalism, as if even special envoys They were something from another time. Then we discovered that this is not the case. In fact, today there are areas from which we cannot receive news. After almost two years of war in Ukraine there is a whole part of the conflict from which we receive no signals, we do not receive real signals from Iran, we barely receive from Gaza. The time when we all thought we had eyes everywhere has turned out to be the time of the world’s blind spots.
Q. The atomic bomb represents a before and after in history and contemporary culture. Why did he choose her as one of the leitmotiv of this novel?
R. To begin with, I started from the aggravating factor of having studied nuclear physics. Recently, I thought I did it because of the attraction to the bomb. The mushroom cloud idea for me was always a foundational image of something. I was really trying to write a book about the atomic bomb, the physicists who had worked on it, but then I started writing Tasmania and it became a subplot. And while writing I understood that what interested me most was the perspective of the survivors. To begin with, think of all of us as survivors of something and then think that the survivors of the Shoah or atomic bombings are about to disappear. The protection that his testimony has given us ends and soon we will enter a completely new era. That’s why in Tasmania I wanted to collect the voice of one of them, in a way, to relate them all.
Q. How do you think you have changed since you wrote The solitude of prime numbers in 2008?
R. To give a vaguely sensible answer, at 25 I was very fascinated by what was happening inside me, I still had to understand many things that were happening inside me. Today, everything that is strictly personal interests me less, accidentally. I feel very attracted, however, to what happens outside of me, to others, to us as a collective.
Q. If we met now, I didn’t know you and I asked you: what do you write about?
R. I would say about fear. Or about fears.
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