A Drive in the role of the character Vito Capuozzo alongside Gianfranco D’Angelo
To remember the disappearance, on 4 July 11 years ago, by Giorgio Faletti, the documentary is aired tonight on Rai 3 Mr. Faletti, directed by Michele Truglio and Alessandro Galluzzi, un Portrait between the public and private of the multifaceted artist. Giorgio Faletti was born in Asti on November 25, 1950. After graduating in law, he dedicated himself to cabaret, cinema and television, making himself known by the general public in drive in. Faletti defined himself as an instinctive: “I am not one who evaluates”. He had ventured into many artistic expressions, always surprising criticism and public. Like when, in 1994, He arrived according to the Sanremo Festival with Mr. Lieutenant. He was also a painter and driver of car racing. And above all writer. Initially to give substance to the comic character of Vito Catozzo in Porco Mondo that under his feet. Then, In 2002, he surprised criticism and public with his first thriller, I killwho has sold more than four million copies. From that moment every two years, while he was divided between the city of Asti and the island of Elba, one of his new books came out, almost all published, like the first, from Baldini Castoldi Dalai: Nothing true except the eyes In 2004, Out of an evident fate in 2006 and then to follow Few useless hiding places, I am God, Notes from a women’s seller, Three acts and two times, Feather And The last day of sun Postums came out. Sick of lung cancer, in spring 2014 he underwent a series of care in Los Angeles. Transferred to the Molinette hospital in Turin, He died on July 4, 2014, at 63 years old
Ready? My name is Giorgio Faletti ». Thus, with a pinch of self -irony, as if he were any stranger, the Piedmontese writer and actor, author of best seller with over three million copies translated into the world in 25 languages, now in the bookstore with the fourth book, the collection of stories, begins on the phone and actor. Few useless hiding places (Baldini Castoldi Dalai). Appointment agreed in Piazza Alfieri, in the heart of Asti, his hometown. Giorgio Faletti arrives in jeans and tennis shoes, cordial and informal, Despite the somewhat suffering air for a bad back pain that folded it. Four steps through the streets of the center interspersed with some chat with the locals, old knowledge that stop him, ask him for his latest book and the neighbor he will publish. «Calm, my collection of stories has just come out. I am working on your neighbor, but it takes less time to read them than to write them », he replies. Here in Asti, everyone knows him. Like Mimmo, the bartender nearby, who reciprocates his greeting from inside the place. In front of the bar, the writer stops to exchange two words with an elderly man, dusting off a little dialect. “He was an old friend of my father,” he explains. Giorgio Faletti has returned home. He took a break from‘beloved island of Elba, who has elected to his residence for years now, To spend some time in the city of his family. “Piedmont is beautiful, but it doesn’t have the sea.” A corner of Italy that has always inspired a lot from a literary point of view. «The fact is that here people are well arranged to the blood flavors of life. It is a land with lights and shadows, which unites a enjoyment to a little conservatism: the Piedmontese laughs, but never walks away ». He, by character, of Piedmontese he feels that he has very little. «I am instinctive, impetuous, humoral. I’m not one who evaluates. In fact, here I was considered a crazy, until I was judged a genius. There are no half measures ». In Asti the writer is renovating the house that was of his mother – a nice apartment in the center from which you can enjoy a splendid panorama of the whole city – with his wife Roberta, very affectionate, also Astigiana, married in 2003. “I went from here at the age of 26, to go to work as a comedian in Milan “. Asti was tight, he never missed, he never heard the call, “I have always returned from time to time to come and visit my parents”. But now the Piedmontese past resurfaces inevitable to the narrator’s mind in images, scenes, colorful life stories. “At the age of 15, my dream in the drawer was to become a writer,” he confesses. Then came his degree in Law, and together the awareness that that would not have been his way. “I am the classic graduate to please dad. Maximum result with minimal effort. And when I said to my father, without any notice, that I wanted to be a cabaret, he was struggling to tell his friends that I had a degree. In his mentality to be a comedian meant not wanting to work ». In New York, or even in Milan, perhaps it would have been different. «In the popular fantasy of the Astigiani, however, I was first a drug addict, then a drug dealer, then a kept by women. All things far from me light years. But it is the scotto to pay if you live in a small provincial town ». Yet, the seven long stories of Few useless hiding places – Noir stories where traditional yellow leaves room for the fantasy genre and the supernatural element – they throb of the experience of the writer: his experience, his past flow here with vivid force. In Spugnolefor example, Piedmont returns, the family, childhood friends return, the locals: “I set it in the country where my grandparents were sharecroppers. MI was called Dafarra, as the protagonist, who also physically resembles him: tall, dry, blue eyes and brush brush, “at Omberta” as they said then then it was then then. My grandmother cut them. “ And then A rubber and a pencil, Opening story: «The story has to do with my almost fraternal friendship with two Astigians with a great graphic talent. One works in Hollywood as an art director, the other, Paolo Fresu, has remained in Asti, is a painter and painted some paintings that I have here at my house ». He adds: “The ability to reproduce the surrounding world with a pencil has always fascinated me, and I wanted to transfer this magic to a story”.
The girl who looked at the water It is one of the stories to which Faletti is more tied: a fable with a happy ending but overturned compared to tradition, because here is the dragon – a sort of monster monster – to save the “princess”. Faletti wrote it a long time ago, in 1995-96; It was one of the stories he presented to his publisher to understand if he had the fabric of the novel writer. Excellent result. «I have a passion for the analysis of diversity, I am fascinated by madness. In this story I wanted to tell the different in the guise of a monster that observes human beings from his point of view. Moreover, the fairy tale is a very difficult genre and has a noir component: it is not easy to become Andersen or the Grimm brothers ». But the story that best represents anthology is undoubtedly Graffiti: Raw portrait, merciless of Claudio Marino, teacher of Literature from Turin, closed in frustration and solitude, in the refusal of affections, a man who has made hatred his reason for life. Inevitable to rethink another teacher, Professor Martinelli, played by Faletti at the cinema in the night before the exams. But if Martinelli evolves from the profound antipathy to humanity, for Marino there is no way of escape, no possibility of redemption. “Professor Marino embodies that total darkness of the soul that my stories represent,” explains the author. «In these seven stories I leave the thriller pure to face the dark side that is in each of us, and that many fear. When certain destructive forces are unleashed inside our mind it is difficult to escape, finding a way out: any hiding place, in fact, becomes useless “. The taste of the macabre, horror, turbid seems like a constant of the writing of Faletti. But, he assures him, he has nothing to do with his personality. What he writes does not scare him, he does not impress him. For him describing evil is a creative pleasure and is liberating, a way to vent that part of aggression, that warrior spirit of revenge that is in every human being. «Once I browsed aggression in sport, playing tennis. Today I make her flow in the stories. Moreover, reality is squalid, never epic. Interpreting it literaryly is a way to exorcise it ». With death, a recurring element of his stories, Faletti had to deal with it a few years ago, in 2002, when he was hit by a brain stroke. «I learned not to postpone what I can do today. Native Americans, much more than us, have rooted the perception that death is the only certainty: they represent it as a white bird laid on the shoulder of each person ». When he does not work, the great passion of Faletti, in addition to sport, today is the cuisine. «I am a good cook, at home I cook. And I discovered that many writers, like my friend Jeffrey Deaver, cultivate this passion. Kitchen and writing have many affinities: the ingredients are always the same; The difference is the imagination and a little technique ». Giorgio Faletti’s personal bookcase? First of all, it contemplates the classics of humor, starting with Mark Twain, because, behind today’s yellowist, the comic carpet remains more alive than ever. And then Hemingway, and Gabriel García Márquez. “I read One hundred years of solitude Only last year, in New York. And it is a fortune that did not do it before: a masterpiece of the genre would have inhibited me as a writer ». But Faletti can feel in place with his conscience. I kill He landed in the United States, American criticism defined the author “a big emerging talent”. «Of course, when you think of a hermering one is expected one of 25 years. But I, with my three novels and a book of stories, really feel like a boy ». Woe to take too seriously, to shake off self -irony. You risk losing contact with people. «I like to tell stories that passionate the public. For me to write is fun. And I do it always keeping a little healthy humor ”
