Despite the fact that, every now and then, superficial prophets, who are not unfamiliar with the need to mount mass-media cases, are ready to decree its end, the novel hasn’t stopped enthralling and amazing us with its inexhaustible power to tell the story of man’s progress along the rock-strewn path of the modern world. Not only do European writers, with their well-established traditions, and North American writers, who have clung to this tradition, bring the novel to life, but so do writers from areas of the world that today, more than ever, catch our attention: African, Indian, Israeli, Lebanese, Pakistani, South African, etc.. Their novels are valuable doors that open onto unknown realities, different cultures and peoples, because the novel, as Vargas Liosa observed, compels us “to communicate “with other human beings, and gives a “sense of belonging to the community of mankind over time and space”.
Our observation of the contemporary Italian novel is born of the belief and from the ascertainment that it is steadily being enriched by new voices and by extremely interesting suggestions and narrative experiences.
In Italy, new generations of writers continue to give an account of the complexity and the contradictions of the world in which we live, while looking at the inexhaustible performance taking place on mankind’s stage. That is, they continue to lie in waiting behind that “incalculable number of windows”, which Henry James saw as being the house of the novel, thereby increasing our experience of the world, while developing our critical thinking.
The aim of this web site, “the paper mirror”, is indeed to start making some of the many threads, of which the close plot of Italian fiction at the beginning of the millennium is woven, visible and to show to the readers the issues and the most significant new releases that the busy work-shop of the novel produces. Thus, it will be possible to verify the condition and energy level of this multiple genre, which is, furthermore capable of linking different languages while dismantling its own body in order to form a new, more solid wholeness.
This impure writing style has been contaminated by other narrative forms, which nourish it. In fact the novel feeds on an endless exchange with, among others, the genre of the short story, the diary and letters. Special attention should therefore be paid to these writing styles, and in particular to those collections of short stories, which as Elsa Morante would say, because of the “homogeneous wealth” of the various parts which form “a developed and harmonious wholeness” make you think of the novel.
With
the Support of the Culture 2000 Programme of the European Union