Erri De Luca

ACTIVELY AGING. Erri De Luca was born in Naples in 1950. A widely celebrated Italian novelist, essayist, poet, and translator, he has been hailed as “the writer of the decade” by Italian critics and his work has been translated into over thirty languages. He has written around 80 books – some say 100 – and is also a translator of important works. He has studied ancient Hebrew, Swahili, Russian and Yiddish, and has translated several books from the Old Testament, such as Ecclesiastes, Exodus and the Book of Jonah. He has also appeared in films and documentaries, including L’età sperimentale (2024), which Feltrinelli subsequently published as a book. It has also recently been published by Gallimard in Paris, where Erri is known for having won several major literary prizes.

32 minutes read time.

You can listen to the podcast of this interview in Italian here.

Erri De Luca, together with the stylish Parisienne model Inès de la Fressange you wrote The Experimental Age. This collaborative work features a reflective dialogue about aging, framed not as a decline, but as a new and active phase of life. What is the experimental age, and why did Inès de la Fressange decide to engage in this dialogue with you?

For me, the experimental age is old age. Even though I’m still a novice at old age, I’m officially old. When I happened to get on a bus and a lady stood up to give me her seat, I realised, in public, that I was officially old. I told the lady it wasn’t necessary because I was getting off at the next stop, even though it wasn’t mine. I got off and then got back on the next bus, and I began to realise that being old in public comes with its inconveniences. It also happens that you’re asked: ‘Do you still climb? Do you still go to the mountains?’ When that adverb of time, ‘still’, creeps in, that’s when, officially, you’ve become old in the eyes of others. Now my answer, when asked how I am, is: ‘Still’. It’s become my calling card.

You are a passionate rock climber. Three years ago when you were 73, why did you undertake a very different climb from your previous ones and even more daring, without safety equipment?

On the rock face, I take no precautions and use no safety gear because it makes me feel good. There are days when my body is so happy that I want to give it this satisfaction. It’s something that allows me to achieve total calm and perfect concentration. It’s clear that I’m exposing myself to risk, but the age of experimentation is a risky age. I don’t make plans for longevity; I don’t believe I’ll live for long, but my aim is to live the present day as intensely as possible. I consider that every day I live now has the right to be my last, but I treat them as if they were my second-to-last so as not to rule anything out.

Inès de la Fressange and Erri De Luca

Erri De Luca, you also do a lot of mental exercises, getting up early in the morning to read or translate from ancient Hebrew, play cards or do other things. Your life at this stage doesn’t seem to have changed much?

No, but now I train more than I did before; I impose a stricter discipline on myself than before. My working-class life taught me a bit of discipline, because for twenty years I worked as a labourer under a very strict regime in terms of physical exertion and time management. Old age, however, is a disciplined time, where you have to bring everything together, body and mind. I play more, I read more; if I had to describe myself, the first thing I’d say is that I’m a reader. I read more than I write; I can read in several languages and this improves my own Italian vocabulary. It’s curious, but the more languages you know, the better you understand the Italian language.

What do you read?

I always read passages from the Old Testament in Hebrew. I’m now at the end of the life of Joshua, but these are books, passages that I keep rereading over the years; I do it daily, it’s become my way of stimulating my ‘slumbering’ mind. I also read books that interest me. I’m lucky; I have a large library, partly left to me by my father, where I keep ‘picking at’ old stories. The present interests me little; I’m interested in the past, where I wasn’t there, and I’m also interested in places I’ve never known. The present in Italy, for example, doesn’t intrigue me because I’m already living it; I don’t go looking for it in my reading. Instead, I look for what I don’t know, unknown writers; for example, by reading in Yiddish, I’ve been able to read pages that haven’t been translated into Italian and which broaden my horizons as a reader. So yes, I read more than before.

Am I right that In your old age you’re more lenient with yourself and enjoy yourself more, that now you let yourself go?

My limitations are always the same: I’ve never been to a nightclub, I’ve never smoked, I’ve never taken drugs, I’ve never taken stimulants. But I pay more attention to the little things, to individual details, to people, and to their behaviour rather than their ideas. I find myself in agreement with people who have a good grasp of loyalty and generosity, and I don’t care which party they vote for or what political views they hold; I recognise them as kindred spirits through this experience. Furthermore, having volunteered in wars such as in Bosnia or now in Ukraine helps me to be closer to the ‘ground level’ of real life and to feel a greater sense of compassion than I did before.

Coming from a middle-class family in Naples, when young you began a very different life and became involved in politics as a militant in the far-left organisation Lotta Continua. You also began working as a labourer in Paris, Turin and elsewhere. Involved in politics, proud to be a labourer, how come you decided to become a writer?

I’ve always found solace in writing because I grew up in a small room crammed with books. It wasn’t my room; it was my parents’ book room. I grew up surrounded by this ‘wallpaper’ of books. So I absorbed this ‘wallpaper’ and became an early reader – of adult stories, incidentally, because there were no children’s stories. I didn’t read *Pinocchio* until I was an adult. I had this introduction to reading, secondary to writing, which kept me company because, by temperament, I wasn’t exactly the ideal Neapolitan; I wasn’t sociable, I was introverted, I was withdrawn. My ideal geographical setting would have been a Norwegian fjord, but instead I found myself in a Neapolitan alleyway; so I put up barriers, defensive lines, and books formed my trench at the time. I therefore grew up with this hostility towards the place that eventually won me over anyway, because my mother tongue is Neapolitan. I extracted myself from Naples. The image I have is of a tooth being pulled from a jaw; I pulled myself out, the tooth was hurting me, but the jaw didn’t notice, it didn’t realise it had to clear a place at the table. But this tooth, pulled from the jaw, didn’t go to take root in any other gum; it remained dangling, with all its Neapolitan roots on show. I found myself inventing freedom, which is leaving home and not knowing where to go. Freedom is frightening at first, it’s an abyss, but I couldn’t bear to stay there any longer. So I catapulted myself out, but as luck would have it, I found myself in the midst of a generation that was already out on the streets, already occupying the centre of the carriageway. This generation was my generation, and I followed it throughout the 1970s. I published my first book when I was around forty, but those were pages I had already piled up, accumulated in drawers, from my earlier days.

You are famous as a writer in many countries and translated into numerous languages, and your passion for the mountains is also well known.  When Lotta Continua came to an end, some of its members went on to hold important positions in society: politicians, journalists, and so on. Not you; you are a writer and a mountaineer?

I worked as a labourer for twenty years. That was what I could do; I had no qualifications and thought I’d carry on; then I didn’t continue because there was nothing else around, there was only that job to do. But those from Lotta Continua who made their way into public life are an extreme minority, let’s say. In mineral water analysis, they’d be called ‘traces’, because most of those people remained anonymous in their own corners, continuing in good conscience to do what they believed was right, without, however, belonging to anything anymore. Like me, who couldn’t belong to anything. The mountains, however, helped me transform the aching muscles of manual labour into happy muscles.

When amongst the workers did you feel one of them, given that you came from a middle-class family and enjoyed literature?

Absolutely, yes. You become a worker just as you become a prisoner. There comes a moment in a prisoner’s life when he admits to himself that he is a prisoner, and that is when he says ‘my cell’; in other words, he uses the possessive ‘my’ before the most alien thing there could be, namely the cell. Well, that is how I became one. From a worker’s perspective, I could say that was my job because it had been so for so long that it had completely absorbed me. I was one of many who didn’t take advantage of special privileges. I imagine that the young man I was during the years of political struggle might recognise in me, now an old man, the continuation of himself, and might be able to shake hands with that person. I believe that few of us have retained that possibility.

You have also delivered humanitarian aid, driving lorries on missions in the former Yugoslavia, and now in Ukraine. You have shown yourself to be a generous person. You say that you now think more of others, but deep down haven’t you always thought of others?

There have been certain events in my life that have shaken me to the point where I could do no other. I was summoned by the events of my time. One day, for example, in the case of Bosnia, I had written an article for *L’Avvenire* on the destruction of the Old Bridge in Mostar when some volunteers heading there to deliver aid invited me to go with them. For me, this wasn’t an invitation; it was a strict order. I could only obey, and so I began going with them. For years I drove those convoys, whilst keeping my job because my colleagues allowed me to go.

Did you carry on writing as well?

I kept myself company through writing.

In your book *L’età sperimentale*, you say little about your life as a writer. Instead you talk about what you do, about playing cards, about climbing mountains and so on. Yet you are a famous writer, and a controversial one at that, given that you refuse literary prizes and do not wish to be part of literary society. Why do you lead a somewhat different life?

I have very few writer friends; I’ve always had more friends who are manual labourers or mountaineers. But writing is still a small part of my day; it’s always been that way. Even when I was doing manual labour, there was that small part of the day that was set apart from everything else—from the wear and tear, from the draining nature of that working-class life—which had that little pocket of time where I could recognise myself, where I could feel I’d snatched a fragment and something for my life from the lion’s mouth. So I don’t consider writing a job. For me, it has always been that saved time, and today it is a happy part of my day, but it is a small, happy part of my day. So I don’t talk much about it, partly because it is, in any case, a solitary and isolated activity.

Do you have a method?

I write in pen in lined notebooks so I don’t go off track.

Then do you type it up or rewrite it?

That’s something I like about writing. When I’m writing a story, I’m writing it for myself. I don’t fully own it; as I write it, it moves, it unravels, it wanders off. Then, when I’ve finished, I don’t go back and reread it because that would make me the reader of my own work; instead, I have to keep being the writer. So I copy those pages out by hand; I copy them out to see if I still like them, if I can do something with them, add or take something away. But I know that this second writing is for someone who will read it, so from my point of view it’s something more affectionate, because I’d like to tell this story to someone else.

Do you hand-deliver the manuscript?

No, I then make a third copy and do it all over again for myself, because I need to be sure I can’t write it any better than that.

Do you do that on a typewriter?

I type it out using my two index fingers on the keyboard.

How did you meet Ines de la Fressange, an incredibly elegant aristocratic woman from a completely different world?

We met at a friend’s house in Paris, a city where people like my books and actually read them. We met by chance and took a liking to one another. It didn’t turn into a friendship, because friendship takes a bit of time to develop, but a sort of immediate rapport formed. So we started spending time together with our respective partners and now we’re very close.

Do you and she share a common view of the experimental age?

No, no. She has a different view, partly because she’s still below the threshold. I don’t think anyone asks her if she’s still doing anything. And then she’s younger than the Pope, whereas I’m officially older than the Pope for the first time, so I’m a proper old man.

The Nightshift Belongs to the Stars

Erri De Luca delivering aid to Ukraine

Erri De Luca, during a literature festival in Jerusalem you stated In an Israeli newspaper: ‘I am a Zionist and there is no genocide in Gaza’, denying the use of the word genocide as employed by the Israelis. This caused quite a stir, especially in Italy, where you were due to give an opening address at the Salerno Literature Festival and were told it would be better to cancel your participation. To this you replied that it wasn’t the Festival that had excluded you, but the Festival that had excluded itself from you. How should we interpret this story?

It might seem as though I am denying it, simply denying that there have been massacres and slaughter. That is not the case. Massacres and slaughter occur because wars are being fought within built-up areas. And within built-up areas, the people caught up in the fighting always suffer the heaviest losses. The defenceless and the helpless suffer the greatest losses because battles fought within built-up areas have this effect. I was in Belgrade in ’99 during the NATO bombings; when artillery from the sky bombs a city, it never misses a shot because every civilian target is hit. I have found myself in the midst of wars, and the word that came to me, that rose to my lips, was massacre. The massacre of defenceless lives. I do not rule out that there are those who speak of genocide, if anyone wishes to use that word, but I cannot bring myself to use it. I have a problem with vocabulary; I can only use my own words, not those of others. When one hears it said that there is an invasion of foreigners in Italy, I say that there is an invasion when an army enters another territory, as Russia did in Ukraine, but one cannot speak of an invasion when it comes to unarmed people, trickling in, including women and children. If one speaks of an invasion, one clearly wants to stir up a sense of defence and opposition, whereas in reality these are flows. So if we call them flows for what they are, the idea of stifling them or repelling them doesn’t immediately spring to mind. In short, I have a sort of loyalty to words and vocabulary. However, if someone wants to call what is happening in Gaza genocide, I have no objection; it is perhaps they who have an objection if I use the word massacre.

What does it mean to you to be a Zionist?

I have been to Israel, though not on this most recent occasion at the Jerusalem Book Fair, during which I merely gave a literary lecture remotely. For me, Zionism is simply recognising the State of Israel. That is Zionism, though I realise that today it has become a despised word associated with the policies of this centre-right religious government, but for me, a Zionist is someone who recognises the State of Israel. For example, the PLO of 1993 recognised the State of Israel and removed the call for the elimination of the State of Israel from its Constitution. Hamas, which seeks its destruction, does not recognise the State of Israel. So, those who claim to be for Palestine must realise that the idea of destroying the State of Israel is not held by all Palestinians; it is held by a section of the Palestinian representation, namely Hamas, whilst the other section does not share this ambition, this plan, this objective of destroying the State of Israel. What is happening that is most serious, in my view, is expansionism, which is not Zionism; it is expansionism in territories such as Judea and Samaria by hundreds of thousands of new ‘settlers’, by new settlements that continue to take land away from the rightful owners of those areas. That is the most serious phenomenon, and it will take longer to address under the new government, because I believe—or rather, I want to believe—that the new government that will emerge in Israel after October will be one that overturns this policy of seizing other people’s land.

Hamas, Hezbollah, Iran, want Israel not to exist and this is a widespread desire. On the one hand, you condemn these settlements; on the other, why do you refuse to entertain the idea that one could say Israel should not exist?

I believe the existence of two states is the only possible solution. Today it seems a difficult solution, but it is a fact that the impossible happens all the time. The impossible is what we call such until it actually happens. The impossible is constantly at the disposal of reality, and I believe that today being a realist means believing in this miracle. I am a realist; I believe in the miracle of two states living in peace. Of course, this requires the disarmament of Hamas, which is also the premise of the current truce, even if it is a truce that is constantly being violated. But two states will be possible.

In the meantime that part of the world is by no means peaceful.

Yes, there are conflicts underway, as there always have been. But I want to believe that this conflict is the last one and not yet another penultimate one, that this time we might manage to rid ourselves of this mutual hatred and hostility, of this war that has been going on since before I was born.

In your view, should writers be free to write about anything, or, as the French say, must they be *engagé*?

No, I don’t think so. I tell stories set in my own time, that is, in that devilish 20th century which weighed so heavily on the lives of individuals. A century that uprooted people from their homeland, scattering them across the globe through migration; a century that destroyed people’s lives, pitted sons against fathers, and confined more people within the confines of life. As the Russians say, ‘when you cut down a forest, splinters fly’. Well, I tell the stories of those splinters and I like telling them – the small lives of people who resisted this great crushing, this great oppression of the era. But they are stories; within them there is good and there is evil. Then, outside of those stories, I am a committed person; I have taken on commitments from which I could not turn away. The return of war to Europe with the invasion of Ukraine, for example, led me to buy, together with another person, a second-hand van and start making aid trips there. These are drops in the desert, but in a desert the drops are well absorbed; nothing is wasted. We have decided to devise our own response to what is on the agenda: war, invasion, the return of war to Europe, and I do this as a person, as a citizen, not as a writer. I don’t put my political views in my books; I don’t want to convince anyone.

What did you think when you were told you couldn’t give your speech, and accused of having replaced the term ‘genocide’ with ‘massacre’? And what do you think of the people in Italy who, to get a pay rise on the railways, wave the Palestinian flag instead of the red flag as they used to do?

I don’t know; I don’t know if people aren’t paying attention, aren’t keeping up to date, and choose a cause the way you choose a football team. That’s just part of the times we live in, and I accept it. As for the Festival, I’d actually told them, in private, to say that I couldn’t take part for personal reasons, just to avoid all this fuss. Instead, they wanted to claim that the ‘ ’ didn’t want me, so I came out with that quip: ‘You aren’t excluding me, it’s the Festival that has excluded itself from me’. Because that’s how it is. Immediately afterwards, I received an invitation to attend two other Festivals which, given that they were a counterbalance, designed to respond to this sort of ‘withdrawal’ on their part, I had to accept. I don’t usually travel around much, but I did receive two invitations straight away.

Many describe you as a man of the left. What do you think of the fact that suddenly the left is against Israel and the right, on the other hand, defends Israel?

It’s always the shell game: they switch sides depending on convenience, on opportunity. It’s all about opportunism. The crux of the matter remains this for me: should Israel stay there or should it be wiped out? Because if it should stay there, then I agree with them; we acknowledge that and move forward in that direction; those who, on the other hand, are for the elimination of Israel are for Hamas. But the fact is, they don’t say it; they hide, they hide behind the slogan, but they don’t say directly that they’re for Hamas. They think they represent the entire Palestinian people, but no, that’s not the case. For me, it simply served to clarify things—but for myself.

What do you think of this world, where media coverage is more important than substance? After all, what happened to you is proof of that. In a way, Hamas has won the media war, whereas the Israelis have not. We live in a peculiar world where you will have to defend your writing by doing increasingly original and personal things in the face of artificial intelligence, which seems to be the big thing in today’s world and which is sparking debate among popes, scientists, people and philosophers.

For now, it seems like a convenience to me; later, it may become more invasive and take up much more of people’s time and intelligence than real people do. We are in this uncertain time, where there is vagueness and resentment, and in this time I am quite out of the ordinary, out of place, because right now I feel more compassion, more feelings of brotherhood than feelings of hostility. If there are people who want nothing to do with me, there’s nothing I can do about it, but I don’t hold it against them. I let them hold it against me.

Are we living in an experimental age?

No, we are living in an age of great confusion. On 25 April this year, during the march commemorating the liberation, Ukrainian flags were removed from the procession – the flags of a nation that is behaving as heroically as possible to avoid succumbing to the largest invasion Europe has faced since the Second World War. “Great is the confusion under heaven, the situation is excellent,” said Mao Zedong. I believe that great is the confusion under heaven.

Are you depressed by this situation?

The situation is depressing, but I don’t let myself get depressed by any situation. I have a character, a sort of Neapolitan DNA that prevents me from letting circumstances get me down.

Is it a sense of humour or fatalism?

It’s a sort of callus that forms during adolescence and which also has to do with self-deprecation. Making fun of oneself is good for one’s health. And besides, I don’t mind being isolated; I need to be true to myself, I need to be the continuation of that young person, of that young man I was at twenty.

Looking back, has your life turned out as you wanted?

It’s gone very well.

That closed door in Naples, leaving home and finding yourself free, yet with all the problems and difficulties that entails; then the unfolding of your life and the end of a political ideal. Have you lived well?

Leaving home back then tore my father’s shirt to shreds; he took it as a bereavement, and it was a pain I could not heal. I could only be there for my parents in their final days, which was my only form of compensation for the pain I had caused.

Did you see them after you left home?

Not for a while. Then my father bought and kept buying copies of Lotta Continua to see where I was and what I was doing; he collected them all. Now I have the complete collection of Lotta Continua because he put it together.

Did you have any brothers or sisters?

 A younger sister who stayed in Naples and led a quiet life.

Even if you left, you weren’t against your family?

No, I was against all the time I’d accumulated; it was as if a spring had wound up and flung me out of there like a pinball. I wasn’t cut out for that. Jack Kerouac’s *On the Road* was a help, even though I didn’t have the space he had, but it was enough for me to leave home to find myself in the thick of it.

In what way are you similar to the Italian singer-songwriter De Gregori?

It has coincided at this moment, quite unintentionally, on two levels: he says he is defending his independence as an artist, that he does not want to be drawn into it, whilst I, on the other hand, have found myself having to defend some uncomfortable words . A writer must do one important thing, which is to write his pages well. That is the important thing; then, if he wants to do something even better, he must ensure that this right—freedom of speech—is better protected, as in the case of the Susa Valley. The fact that he helped that community, that he went on trial for that community, meant that the words of that struggle, of that valley, were heard more widely and respected more. So, what a writer can do next is become a tool for amplifying the voice of those who are fighting to be heard. This is what a writer can do after having written their pages well. De Gregori writes his pages well, and if he doesn’t want to do anything else, he has every right not to. As a writer, I feel I must do something else; I can commit myself to ensuring that people who do not have the same access to being heard as I do, as a writer, can be heard.

Words are fundamental in a writer’s life.

That is why I try to defend them, both my own and those of others.

In your books, from your earliest works to those of today, have you changed?

No, I haven’t evolved.

Are you fond of all the books you’ve written?

Yes, because I’m a debutant. Every time I write a story, for me it’s the first; all the ones I’ve written before don’t help me write the next one, the one I’m writing now. I can’t say I’m accumulating experience because I have no experience. My experience lies solely within a volume called a dictionary. I know that I couldn’t have written the pages I’ve submitted any better than this, so I’m at peace with them. Some have been read more or less, had more or fewer readers , but I wouldn’t take any of those pages out; otherwise, I wouldn’t have submitted them. It’s a sense of responsibility I feel, first and foremost towards myself rather than towards others.

You sometimes write books of just a few pages. Why do you never write very long books?

Because I think a writer is a guest in the reader’s time. I am more of a reader than a writer, so I know that the moment I pick up a book is a moment when I am giving myself a gift that I must enjoy. The guest must rise from the table whilst he is still welcome.

This is no longer the age of the novels of Tolstoy, Dickens, of these great novels running to pages and pages?

As a reader, yes, I also enjoy reading substantial volumes, great works. But I consider myself a temporary guest in a reader’s time, and the best thing a reader can do is, as my mountaineer friend used to do, go to a café and read a book until they’ve finished it. For me, that’s the best outcome.

What are you writing at the moment?

I’m writing a column for my Erri De Luca Foundation; it’s a foundation that awards scholarships to immigrant students, and we’ve already helped some graduates through to degree level. Then, every Sunday, I explain a Hebrew verb from Genesis.

You are not writing any novels or books?

I go through periods where I don’t tell myself stories.

Are you afraid of the blank page?

I’ve never been afraid of it because I write on the page when I feel like writing, when I’m ready to write; I don’t just open the page and wait for inspiration.

Do you agree that there are fewer truly significant writers today?

There have always been very few writers who leave a lasting mark on a reader’s life. However, publishing houses are obliged to produce a certain volume of books, which results in a glut of trivial, easy, lightweight titles that are meant to clear the stock in the first few weeks and then disappear.

Erri De Luca, thank you. I wish you all the very best. We’ll also be following the festivals and the places you’ll be visiting closely. Will you be defending yourself?

No, I am defended by my words.

Where are the places you’ll be speaking at?

I’ve now been invited to Pordenonelegge.

Then we’ll follow you and hope to read one of your new books soon.

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