The 10 best Italian writers

Genre for genre there are certain symmetries between Italian literature and Spanish, International. It will be a shared Mediterranean thing, of an idiosyncrasy replicated on both sides of the westernmost shores of the Mare Nostrum. The similarities are better understood from a XNUMXth century in which cultural symbiosis finds greater accommodation between referents from one side and the other. Since Vazquez Montalban with Camilleri to José Luis Sampedro with Italo Calvino.

Many authors find more or less casual synergies on both sides. And that believing in coincidences is a matter of great faith. So for a reader with Spanish references located at the top, he can equally enjoy the Italian narrators on the other side of the mirror.

It happens with music or with any other art. The influences are always, in the first instance, those that emanate practically from the telluric, from the geographical location, from the climate and even from the light. Beyond always welcome and even necessary influences from other places, art preserves idiosyncrasy like a background sonata that rocks any work.

Let's go there with those writers from Italy rescued for this site. I have commented on it on many occasions but I remember it once again, my natural habitat is the XNUMXth and XNUMXst centuries. To avoid stoning of the most classic and purists of the place…

Top 10 Recommended Italian Writers

Umberto Eco

Only a persistent semiologist can write two novels like Foucault's Pendulum or The Island of the Day Before and not perish in the attempt. Umberto Eco He knew so much about communication and symbols in the history of mankind, that he ended up spilling wisdom everywhere in these two fiction books towards the ultimate reach of the meaning of the human being.

At first (and for many readers also ultimately), they may seem too dense novels, in which a fascinating secret to be revealed is intuited but that progress too slowly, scrutinizing details that escape the common reader less interested in theoretical depths.

Now that this author has left us, we may miss him. His legacy has been taken up by Dan Brown o Javier Sierra in the national panorama, to name two worthy heirs. But, without detracting from it, none of the great current mystery authors have such a level of wisdom about the great enigmas that concern us as a civilization.

Umberto Eco also wrote a humanistic and philosophical essayLike the good professor that he was. Whether dealing with fictional literature or more real topics, Eco always managed to enthrall millions of readers. And here is his jewel:

The Name of the Rose

Italo Calvino

The heterogeneous guild or writer's profession is surely the most casual of all. Discovering that you want to tell something and that you more or less know how to tell it is the most authentic way to become a writer. Everything else seems to me, sincerely irrelevant. Lately I see a kind of "writing schools" proliferate, as my curmudgeon grandfather would say: a bitch, nothing more.

All this comes, although not very much, by the fact that one of the great as Italo Calvino It confirms the maxim that the writer does, but makes himself. Nothing more self-taught than to start writing just because. If you are looking for resources or ideas, if you need support or reinforcement, dedicate yourself to something else.

Yes I said right one of the greats, Italo Calvino, would never think of being a writer when he was studying engineering, like his father. Only a time later, after the Second World War, he found a place as an improvised journalist at the same time that he became interested in Literature.

There are two Calvinos, even three or even four (I particularly take the second). At first he wanted to reflect that harsh reality of war and post-war. A normal thing in light of an atrocious reality. But years later he would find his most successful path: fantasy, allegorical, fabulous ...

Until he also got a bit tired of that fantastic trend and ended up in surrealism, which must be what we have left as we get closer to the end and discover the whole hoax. The return to the essay and the social as a phenomenon of study closed his literary years before the stroke that ended him in 1985.

The nonexistent knight

Andrea Camilleri

The Italian Master Andrea Camilleri he was one of those authors who filled thousands of pages thanks to the support of his readers around the world. It began to emerge in the 90s, a fact that demonstrates the perseverance and vocational writing as the foundation for their vital longevity extended to black on white.

En one of his last works, Do not touch me, Andrea continued to demonstrate that facility for the composition of black police genre plots even at his advanced age. Well-trained virtuosity seems to be with you at all times. His classic setting, in which he masterfully develops his black plots, is deep Sicily, whether in real or invented spaces, but always with that roots of the great Italian island.

Here I leave one of his most unique works where Camilleri summarizes humor, with a certain flavor of Mediterranean saltpeter, with the demonstration of that undeniable gift to erect suspense plots with an even annoying ease. A small teaching exercise for any self-respecting writer:

Hunting season

Claudio Magris

Among the most veteran and recognized Italian authors, stands out a Claudio Magris He has become a writer of everything, with that license that age confers on those who have played the quarters in all kinds of battles.

In the absence of Andrea Camilleri made total authority of the Italian narrative, Magris collects the trastros although he does not participate in the same genre. Because the question in literature is that it is still understood that the older the wiser, as in the past in power ...

So looking at the Magris bibliography is already an act of reverence. Even more so when it is discovered that its fiction and non-fiction aspects regularly converge as tributaries that feed each other, composing a channel of literature and truth, of formal aesthetics but also of commitment.

Magris is one of those authors who alternates his works as necessary to other literature that is more frugal in content and fleeting in sustenance. Here is a unique work by Magris:

The Danube, by Claudio Magris

Alessandro Baricco

he current Italian literature enjoys a commendable variety in its main authors. From a Erri De Luca that even today is lavished on a literature overflowing with sensitivity and transformative ideology, up to a Camilleri inexhaustible in his role as ruler of the detective and crime novel even the youngest as Saviano, realistic to the depths of society, Moccia in his role as the mainstay of the romantic genre or the captivating Luca D'Andrea, recent European literary phenomenon.

Halfway through generation we find a Alessandro Baricco Cuya Biblography already acquires a considerable dimension and whose imprint provides a formal and thematic distinction that you may like more or less, but that ends up giving it a point of distinction, a stamp that immediately associates work and author because only he approaches their stories as if they were of their own genre. will try.

It is true that sometimes his books can be too "experimental", but it is no less true that his capacity for surprise brings freshness and transgressive intentionality from a style that, despite everything, is easy for every reader. Here is one of Baricco's best books:

Silk, from Baricco

Natalia Ginzberg

The surname Levi is quickly associated in Italy with the anti-fascist struggle from literature to politics. But the truth is that Natalia Ginzberg (Natalia Levi really) has nothing to do with her contemporary, fellow Italian and also Jewish Primo Levi.

And that is precisely what literature provoked their chance meeting on some occasion. But ultimately inconsequential. No spark arose and it is even known that Natalia rejected some of her works while working at the Einaudi publishing house.

So each one followed his career and his life. Concepts of literary career and life that came to be something indissoluble (as a chronicle and commitment from the complaint) in the difficult times that both had to live from their youth.

With the burden of hard times, Natalia became a kind of writer of testimonies that today seem like crime novels. Readings very different from those of then in search of empathy with the will to overcome the ominous by comparing them with a current review.

Because now, reading Natalia awakens that feeling of strangeness in the incomprehensible closeness to the monsters that can inhabit us as humans. Meanwhile, at one time or another, overcoming is observed as an undeniable ability of the human being, always.

The little virtues

Erri de Luca

Perhaps once the generational coincidence determined in a deterministic way the creative work of so many authors affiliated, for pleasure or with little knowledge, to current trends.

The point is that today two storytellers from the 50s, pointers in Italian narrative as Alessandro Baricco y Erri de Luca they look as much as an egg to a chestnut. And sincerely it is something to be grateful for that at this point everyone ends up creating, painting, composing music or writing, about and how they want.

The good old Erri De Luca has always preserved that lyrical point that embellishes like a finishing touch the transcendent scope of the small, of the reading focus that varies like a zoom to see the hands that caress or the same gesture in the middle of a great storm, from black clouds that dwarf the figure of those two people facing each other.

Erri's literary vocation is not that it was something very precocious. But in the writer's trade, sometimes it is precisely that, to collect experiences, to give oneself to other tasks to end up giving faith a posteriori of what has been lived and of the impressions on everything seen, enjoyed, understood or even cursed. Here is one of his best works:

The exposed nature

Susanna Tamaro

There is some innovative genre in the Italian Tamara. It is as if the allegorical found in this author a new coexisting space between the realism closest to our feet and a spirituality made fantasy, wishes, memories, hopes. In that balance between the lyrical and the action, any novel by this author reaches that dimension only at her entire disposal, like a new world.

With a sometimes fabulous point, with its inspiration perhaps from the Italo Calvino creator of short stories, Susanna's already considerable bibliography leads us with that pause in literature that comes better with rest to discover nuances.

The question is to start with the necessary curiosity and end up taking that point of a different author who whispers her stories moved between soft summer winds, like melancholic currents or relaxing melodies, always around love, life, death and the soul, yes it is that it can become, made limpid literature.

Where the heart takes you

Elena Ferrante

For many it is unlikely, to the utmost limits, that someone who achieves the glory of his work does not want to be known, pose on red carpets, do interviews, attend posh galas ... But there is the case Elena Ferrante, the pseudonym that shelters one of the great literary enigmas of our days.

For the author (some low-cred research put a real name finally discarded), this total cover-up serves the cause of a narrative without the slightest contemplation or concession. Whoever takes the controls of Ferrante enjoys being a creator without complexes or nuances, without that self-censorship (more or less rooted in each author) between conscience and the notion of the repercussion of what is written.

There are already many years in which Ferrante has been writing books. And the most curious thing about his case is that little by little his curiosity has been annulled by the value of his novels. There are still those who periodically wonder Who is Elena Ferrante? But readers have become completely used to not putting a face to whoever writes on the other side.

Of course, we cannot rule out that behind this enigmatic editorial procedure some kind of strategy is not hidden with which to arouse curiosity ... If so, let no one be fooled, the important thing is that Ferrante's novels are good. And a good read is never a hoax.

And so the magic you probably always sought is finally produced Ferrante as a person or the Ferrante project. Intimate and at the same time very lively narratives place us in front of hyper-realistic portraits of existence, with a deep look at a twentieth century scene to which the author seems to owe something, or in which something could have been lost. Stories almost always about women, protagonists of love, heartbreak, passions, madness and struggles.

The great friend

Maurizio de Giovanni

El italian noir, so in keeping with Spanish in its Latin origins with corruption-oriented foothills and mafias installed at all levels, you will always miss a figure like Camilleri.

And yet, thanks to an author like Maurizio de GiovanniThis taste for criminal literature will still be in force in its aspect of police investigation that, under its particular seal, maintains those patterns of the great police writers of the second half of the XNUMXth century.

For that effect of penetration in every social and political sphere towards corruption capable of leading to crimes, de Giovanni also introduces us to his fetish characters that novel after novel present us with that underworld on which reality is sustained. Almost always with the Naples stage, a city full of as many charms as myths and black history.

Shared spaces in all social strata in which ambitions, passions, the desire for any quota of power and betrayals conspire to end up emerging periodically with their load of crude parallelism with the real chronicles that occasionally dot the news. when things get out of hand.

Not all his novelistic production has reached our country. But each one of the new stories that arrive confirms him as a fundamental author for police lovers with that hardboiled aftertaste that arouses intense emotions.

The winter of Commissioner Ricciardi
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