Archy was born in the forest and his childhood is not as easy as it should be. A peasant murdered her father, forcing her mother to break her back to support her five children. Such is the precariousness, that the fury of the parent comes out of her insides when someone gets sick. “We can’t afford a doctor,” she often scolds them. That’s why Archy trembles when he goes limp after a fall. The rebuke is not long in coming: he gives it up for adoption in exchange for a little food.
The protagonists of Mis estúpidas ideas (Gatopardo/ Club editor), Bernardo Zannoni’s debut feature (Sarzana, 1995) who has been so successful in Italy and who has won the prestigious Campiello award, are not humans but martens, mammals that are cousins weasel brothers Solomon, little Archy’s new tutor, is a fox. But this detail is something that the reader can easily forget because, even though they are animals, many of them act like people: they cook, read, wrap themselves in blankets to sleep, clean themselves with napkins and, most importantly, they think.
“I chose martens because hardly anyone talks about them,” confesses the twenty-eight-year-old author during his visit to Barcelona, ??a city that he has arrived avoiding by plane, because “I didn’t have a good experience in the past.” He was always clear that his characters would get out of the ordinary. “If he had chosen humans, this story would not have the same impact since we would have to take into account his historical context, his work and his motivations. An animal, on the other hand, gives you greater narrative flexibility. For this reason, since ancient times, fables have been used to transmit knowledge”.
There are several works for adults that have animals as protagonists, including Animal Farm and Juan Salvador Gaviota, two classics of literature. However, the usual thing is that these stories are reserved for children and young people. Zannoni wants to put an end to this myth and encourages other authors to cross the borders of the normative.
“It has to be the content of a book that determines the age and type of reader it is intended for and not the species to which the characters belong. Animals give us the ideal point of view of a world that we no longer see clearly because we are inside life itself. They allow us not to judge, so not taking advantage of them literally would be a mistake.
Zannoni was twenty-one years old when he dusted off his pen and began this novel, for which he has also won the Bagutta, Salerno Letteratura and Severino Cesari awards. “I was in a dark period of my life and the only thing that managed to distract me was writing. My conflictive relationship with the world required me to express in writing what I felt and said. When I finished expressing my feelings, I knew that I had to continue. Focusing my mind on avoiding the blank page helped me, although I didn’t really know what it could contribute. It was only clear to me that it would take place in the forest, since it is an indefinite place to have carte blanche and that freedom is what I craved so much then and still now”.
Of course, the young author warns while taking off his sunglasses, from which he never separates, to show that he is serious: “There are hard passages, like life itself, so if someone expected a fairy tale This is not your book.”
He advances to the reader that “what I tried to reflect above all things is survival. Not just the animal kingdom. Also the day to day. You have to survive at work, in social relationships, in conventions… Then there are more extreme cases, like the one that lives at the gates of Europe and in so many other countries with a war. The resistance of one country to another that also wants to live on this chessboard that is the world. We all behave in this wild condition, so survival is a constant”, she concludes.
