Who sends the waves by Fabio Genovesi is among the candidates for the most prestigious award for contemporary Italian literature, La Strega. Mondadori officially nominated the young Tuscan author for the prize after the undeniable success of his new novel. La Strega is an annual award, given every year since 1947, for new Italian literature. Some of the most famous titles that have won this award in the past are books by Alberto Moravia, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampadusa, Umberto Eco, Dacia Maraini, Paolo Giordano. The nominees can only be titles, published during the course of the previous year. The jury consists of 400 members, all of which artists, writers and intellectuals. The first selection takes place in June at the mansion of the Bellonci family, producers of the famous Strega liqueur and founders of the award, and the winner is announced in July in Rome.
As Fabio Genovesi revealed himself during the book presentation in Milan in March, the writing of this last novel took him almost four years and numerous revisions. He has the habit of writing down the text by hand at first and only then transfers the written to the computer. He also added that at the end he even asked the publishers for another two weeks extension to check everything once again.
Similarly to Esche Vive, here again the protagonists are ‘marked’ people like Luna, the strange albino girl, who adores the sea but has to keep away from the sun and her dark-skinned classmate, immigrant, who ousts Luna from the last place of the ranking in their class.
The novel was presented in the new bookshop Spazio Open, famous for its new concept of space, uniting bookshop environment with a typically Italian bar. The audience was diverse, ranging from fans of the author of various ages to young people who simply shift seats from the bar to the presentation area, and regular bookshop visitors, who quickly gather as soon as the microphone is switched on and we hear “Buona sera”. Genovesi arrives together with the writer Silvia Ballestra, who acts as a mediator for the event.
The first impression from seeing Genovesi in person is of a very shy and gentle guest who is a bit uncomfortable to stand in the limelight. But the moment he start speaking, he changes completely, fills the space entirely. He would have been a fantastic actor in one man shows with multiple characters impersonations. He tells us that he takes his stories from real people and real events in his Versiglia, where the summers are full of tourists and the long winters with absurd but authentic characters. He says that he has learned to narrate from the long meetings and conversations with his extravagant natives, who ‘may not know how to write but are the most masterful storytellers in the world’. For the same reason, in his books there are often ‘some magical elements that you see in reality’ – the migration of swallows or the breeding of eels are for Genovesi just as inexplicable as some fictional paragraph in a fairy tale. Therefore, instead of making up unbelievable stories he prefers to stay amazed and to tell mundane ‘inexplicable’ things, for instance, how waves are born.
Via Lettera wishes success to Genovesi’s latest novel in the selection and competition for the prestigious Strega Award.