Paolo Cognetti
Some Question To

Objectively, there are many short story writers out there. Too many.
All busy describing epiphanies and catharses, convinced they're revealing the mystery to us.
Of the good ones, good short story writers who know how to reinvent themselves and immerse us in other people's lives, on the other hand, there are few. Paolo Cognetti is one of them.

According to legend, Cognetti decided to become a writer in '92, in a church cinema, after watching "Dead Poets Society."
Five years later came Carver and with him the discovery of American fiction. In 2004, he made his debut in the collection of young pens "La Qualità Dell'Aria" for Minimum Fax.
He subsequently published: "Manuale Per Ragazze Di Successo," "Una Cosa Piccola Che Sta Per Esplodere," and more recently "New York È Una Finestra Senza Tende" (Laterza).

Now that I've made this somewhat sterile list of his personal achievements, it's known that I must conclude the introduction. Like tying the knot of a bow after three or four loops.
And the point is that despite my chain of dates making it appear flat and uninteresting (just like when in high school we read in Flaubert's biography that "His life passed without significant events" and we know that in reality it wasn't so), here's a good way to prove the contrary: by reading what he thinks about books and writing.

-Introduce yourself, how old are you, where do you live, and what are you doing these days.

I'm thirty-two years old. These days I'm living in the mountains, but with winter, I'll return to Milan. I've always been split between two places and two jobs: writing, and having a troubled relationship with writing, I need to do something else to stay in shape, in body and spirit. And since writing is solitude and immobility, often the something else is company and movement. In the last ten years, I've made documentaries, taught writing courses, worked in an inn that is also a cultural club. Now I'll start cooking in a small restaurant.
 
- Which authors do you feel have influenced you the most? Which ones do you admire and why?

American short story writers. Short stories are my form, and I can't fully explain why: it has to do with the control you can exert over the story, with the possibility of taking a model and working on it, experimenting with new solutions, and at the same time trying to build a perfect mechanism. Americans are masters of short stories, or at least they were once. I believe it's because in their tradition, the talent for storytelling comes before the intellectual function we assign to a writer in Europe. I'm attached to this vision of fiction. First, tell a story. I love various writers, but my masters are Ernest Hemingway, J.D. Salinger, Raymond Carver, Alice Munro: I know by heart many stories by these authors.

-Salinger, what is his work that you appreciate the most? What has captivated you about this author, in your opinion, what is his strength?

It's very difficult to choose between the Nine Stories and The Catcher in the Rye. Among the former, "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" and "For Esmé - with Love and Squalor" stand there, every time I put pen to paper, as absolute models of perfection, I have studied and copied them just like a young painter does with Caravaggio. They throw off the linearity of the classic tale, they jump in time and space, they have more cinematic than literary dialogues and they seem written this morning, yet they are from the Forties. However, they also give me an impressive sense of rationality, a lot of craft used to contain very strong urges, like the madness of a war veteran. The Catcher in the Rye, perhaps because it is a novel, escapes control now and then. And I really like it when a writer like Salinger lets himself go. It's an immortal book because of its narrative voice, the neurotic, unforgettable voice of Holden Caulfield. He is one of those characters I use with strangers: if you don't like Holden, it's unlikely we'll become friends.

-When you are about to write a story, what path do you follow? What objectives do you set, what must "be there" for a story to work?

For me, there must be a strong character. I have a sort of infatuation with the protagonist of my story, I spend a lot of time building them, living in their world. Inside them, there's often someone I care a lot about. And writing for me is also a way of thinking about that person, indeed I would say it's a way of loving them, of expressing my love for them. So I start here: where they come from, what they do, how they live, without worrying about the plot. Usually, it's an unhappy character, otherwise why tell their story? And at a certain point, they meet another who shows them elsewhere, a possible happiness. Like Alice with the White Rabbit. Here the story begins: from a relationship between two people. An orphan girl meets an old childless teacher; a girl who feels imprisoned meets one who seems free. But to see her this way takes a lot of time, the process is not simple at all. All the initial work is a sort of encirclement around the character, before focusing them and understanding where they want to go.

-In "Una Cosa Piccola Che Sta Per Esplodere" you depicted stories with adolescent protagonists. But don't you think that, in the media and even among your colleagues, there is already an excessive interest in the adolescent age? Especially in a country where the birth rate is very low and the largest demographic groups belong to those born during the economic boom?

And who cares? Sorry for the bluntness of the answer, but I write about what matters to me. I don't feel part of a media system and I'm not anyone's colleague. I believe that every writer is as alone as a dog, dealing with a sheet of paper and their own demons. If they're having a dialogue with someone, perhaps they are doing it with their masters, and maybe it's people who have been dead for fifty years.
 
-What is the last book you've read?

The last good book I've read is "Accabadora" by Michela Murgia: a novel by a Sardinian writer, strange for one who loves American stories, right? But I'm open to discoveries, and then this story has many things in common with those I like.

- Time has dedicated the cover to Jonathan Franzen, what do you think of this author and the hype that has been created around him?

I've never read anything by Franzen. I don't even know what hype is, I apologize. But I can tell you that the myth of the Great American Novel, a holy grail which, if I've understood correctly, Franzen is also searching for, leaves me indifferent. I'm afraid a good part of American fiction has become ultra-literary. This means the purpose is no longer to tell, but to make literature, using the novel to represent the country, our time, the mind of contemporary man, and the world. Today, a leading American writer, in his forties, preferably white and New Yorker, has to write a lot, and write difficult, to be taken seriously. It seems to me an inferiority complex that American writers have towards 19th-century Europe, a need to find their own Flaubert or Dostoevsky. For me (but I didn't say it, Robert Altman did) the Great American Novel was written by Carver, with his fifteen-page stories. It was written by Bruce Springsteen with his four-minute songs. It's not a great period for short stories in America, I hope it passes.
 
-What are you currently working on?

On my third collection, which I hope will be finished in 2011. These are stories about pirates, so you won't say I'm following trends! And then I'm translating some poems by Grace Paley which will come out next year. And then I'm working on a book of interviews with Italian female writers. And then, without any project behind it, in the last six months, I have written several pieces about the mountains, and at this point, I'm starting to feel like making something out of it, although I still don't know what. And then there are the characters of the fourth collection, who are beginning to take shape in my head, but I have to resist and put them away for at least a year, and then I'll dedicate myself to them. In short, fortunately, the blank page is not my problem.

-Will the fourth book contain pirate stories. Why have you turned towards these characters?

It's a long story. It has to do with a literary passion (Defoe and Stevenson and all maritime literature) and a political passion (the anarchist thought that finds, romantically, in the pirate ship one of its models). It's nice when writing unites pieces of your life that seemed so distant. But in the book, there's actually not even a pirate, just a lot of parrots and wooden legs and black flags.