Erri de Luca has just arrived from Ukraine, her sixth trip in a van to distribute humanitarian aid.
He attends to the journalists from the kitchen of his house, before a table that he himself built “with some leftover wood” and with a back wall with wine labels “that remind me of the friends with whom I shared them”. It is the image of simplicity and ideological coherence.
The origin of ‘A natural size’ (Seix Barral), a kind of extreme stories of fathers and sons, was the proposal that a museum made to Erri de Luca. The author had to choose a work and opted for the portrait that Chagall made of his father. “I am an admirer of Chagall, that’s where the idea for the book began.”
From the experiences of Marc Chagall to the sacrifice of Abraham, this unclassifiable man considered one of the most important Italian authors of all time reviews the filial knots that unite for life, although, sometimes, it is from rejection or ingratitude. “I was lucky to belong to a generation that decided to embark on a new path that was neither the one indicated by the family nor the public authorities.”
De Luca, who has not been a father, acknowledges that the issue was complex for him. But he has reflected on how he was his son. In the book, for example, he remembers his mother visiting him in prison with infinite gratitude and love.
“I was a docile son in childhood and early adolescence, with a closed character. My parents were great readers, more he than she, and I grew up physically in a room: the one with my father’s books”, evokes the author. “My father’s books were my toys, that was my intimacy, I took refuge there because I didn’t listen to the screams and the noise of the streets of Naples.”
It should be remembered that Erri de Luca has been a union man and politically committed. At the age of 18 he participated in the movement of 68 and later was a member of the group Lotta Continua. “I refused to make a career as my father wanted, I left, at 18 I dissociated myself from the family. Without slamming the door but without warning. and they told me later that my father, realizing it, tore his shirt. A gesture of mourning in Jewish culture, by the way.”
This man who was once a bricklayer and a truck driver and who during the Balkans dedicated himself to driving humanitarian aid cars, analyzes the deepest bonds between parents and children. He now he continues to help in the conflict with Ukraine. “I don’t believe in Putin’s nuclear threat, I don’t think it’s real, he does it to scare Europe.”
The book has been influenced by the Old Testament. “I am very interested. Isaiah appears with the first evocation of the ‘our father’. When Abraham is about to sacrifice his son, to cut her throat with the knife, the divinity stops him. The author infers that from this gesture comes the limitation of divine power. He “he separated himself from omnipotence to leave margin of freedom and error to the individual, to the family”.
Passionate mountaineer, Erri de Luca, born in 1950 in Naples, considers that his love for the mountains comes from his father. His mother was a soldier in the First World War in the mountains of Greece, “they protected him and transferred him to me”.
Another of the stories that he introduces in the book is the one that, according to him, has marked her most profoundly. “The story of the pediatrician who in the summer of 1942 died with some children in Treblinka. He was not the biological father but he was the real father of those 300 children who were put in wagons and who ended up, along with him, in the gas chamber.
Warns the reader how to approach “Life Size.” “Don’t get bored, do like me: if I open a book and I’m already bored, I close it”.
