Margaret Mazzantini never planned to be a writer - her father's despair put her off the idea - but the Irish-Italian Impac nominee has become one of Italy's star novelists, writes Paddy Agnew
Many years ago, the Irish painter Anne Donnelly and her husband, the writer Carlo Mazzantini, invited my wife and me to their house in Tivoli, outside Rome, for a garden party. There was plenty of food and drink and even a terrific little band. Above all there was a lot of earnest chat among the guests, who included other writers, painters, academics and even a secret-service agent. The conversation was hot and heavy, hitting on politics, literature, painting, philosophy and much more besides. The atmosphere in and around the house, however, was warm and friendly. It seemed a good place to grow up, a good place to live out your childhood.
Anne and Carlo's daughter Margaret, who is now an award- winning novelist, also recalls Tivoli as a special place. The 44-year-old, who has been shortlisted for the International Impac Dublin Literary Award for her novel Don't Move (Non Ti Muovere), is a literary star in Italy. When it was published, in 2001, Don't Move was a stunning and largely unexpected success, selling more than 1.5 million copies.
She says that her writing, in many senses, began back in Tivoli, in the family home with her parents and three sisters. "If you grow up in the country it gives you a different way of observing life," says Mazzantini. "We didn't have a lot of money. When my father went off to work we were stuck there. In a sense we grew up very isolated; that was our universe. We had chickens, and we lived off the land. I learned to be good at doing things with my hands, and I still am. I grew up in a house, too, where there were always people telling stories around me. After all, my father himself was a writer."
Don't Move is an intense, atmospheric and superbly crafted book focused on the "confession" of Timoteo, a successful surgeon who tells his tale to his gravely injured daughter at her hospital bedside. Timoteo's tale is one of betrayal and deceit, but it is also an account of a spiritual journey in which his sense of Camus-like alienation is subtly, increasingly undermined by a doomed affair with a woman who, not for nothing, is called Italia.
Set in today's Italy, the story reflects an intense spiritual malaise that goes far beyond the country's borders. "I look at the world from head height. I look at people, relationships between people, love, life and death, the great universal themes put into the context of our time. For me it's a writer's duty to try to recount his own time but to do it in a language that isn't stylised. Writing has to be enigmatic, mysterious, have a symbolic substratum. Literature must also be emotion; it must grab you by the throat and sweep you along as you read it. I'm not interested in architecturally perfect books, geometrically calculated but lacking in slings and arrows, in humanity."
Some writers find it difficult to talk about their work. Mazzantini does not come into that category. Ask a question and she bursts forth without reticence or difficulty, describing the creative process as she experiences it. She concedes that the writing itself does not always flow so easily. It took her seven years to write her first novel, Il Catino di Zinco, and five years to write Don't Move.
For a long time she had no desire to be a writer. Growing up with a writer parent put her off the idea. "My father was very heavy. Given his example, the last thing I thought of doing was writing. For me literature was something that made you suffer. My father wrote the same book for 40 years. I remember he would come down from his study in the evening and sit and read what he had just written and be very upset."
Mazzantini's first call was to the stage. Before the end of her teens, having graduated from Rome's academy of dramatic arts, she was out on the road, working as an actress. After a few years she began to question her choices. "I was very reserved. I liked the work, but I didn't like all the travelling. I started off early. I was doing Antigone in Syracuse at 18 years of age. The problem for me was that, as an actor, you're an instrument, the mouthpiece for the author and the director, and after a while this becomes restrictive. I began to think that I had something to say myself."
She has now largely abandoned acting. Writing is simply too demanding, she says. Writing and being a mother of three, she should add. For her acting career did change the course of her life in one very serious way. Through it she met her husband, Sergio Castellitto, who is now one of Italy's best-known cinema stars. The couple have three children, Pietro, Anna and Maria, and a fourth is very clearly on the way.
The family is central to Mazzantini's life. We are meeting in the office of her elder sister, Moira, who runs a prominent cinematic agency. During the interview, Castellitto calls to say he will be home shortly, and one of the children calls to ask how to get to a swimming lesson.
"I can't work at home. It's hard for a woman to work at home. The kids are always hanging out of me. I also love to cook, and my kids love what I cook, so I end up cooking a lot. So, nowadays, I've rented a little studio just down the road from here, where I go to work. When the kids go to school in the morning I go off to my little studio to write."
Her relationship with her husband often transcends family life. The two have acted together. More importantly, Castellitto is her first reader, the person to whom she shows her writing long before it gets anywhere near her editor, let alone the public. On top of that, they combined to produce a very successful version of Don't Move, starring Castellitto (who else?), Penélope Cruz and Claudia Gerini.
Inevitably, one wonders how Irish Mazzantini considers herself to be. Her tall good looks certainly contain a hint of an Irish bloodline, but her energetic manner and flowing Italian - she is not comfortable in English - suggest a dynamism that is more Mediterranean than Hibernian. Although she was born in Dublin and lived in the city until she was five, she has very few memories of it. Her childhood memories focus on the family homes in Tivoli and, before that, Tuscany.
"I consider myself a strange mix of Irish and Italian. There is a lot of both my parents in me and my work. I'm full of life, and I don't take myself too seriously, and I consider that to be very Irish. As a writer, though, I am an outsider. I've never been part of any literary group or club."
Growing up, she read Dostoevsky, Faulkner, Heinrich Böll, Louis-Ferdinand Céline, Marguerite Duras, Elsa Morante and William Trevor, among others, all in Italian - not a classic Anglo-Saxon canon but very similar to the writers that many 17-year-old Italians would today read at school.
Her parents met in postwar Paris, where her mother, still a successful painter, was then studying. Her father had left Italy partly to escape his past. Brought up in the fascist years, he had gone off to fight for Mussolini's puppet republic of Salò, the post-1943 statelet that Hitler set up in northern Italy. As an impressionable 16-year-old, he had felt it the honourable thing to do. In a memorable novel, A Cercar la Bella Morte, he recounts this experience, one that until recently had been relatively ignored by Italian historians.
"My father has much changed since then. He was only a boy. He had grown up in the fascist years under Mussolini. Now he is on the left. But all of that is too long a story to go into now."
As for herself, what is she writing now? "I'm not quite sure, just yet. Maupassant said a great thing. He said the story is the nail on which you hang the painting. For that reason I like to tell a story, to take the reader along, but I don't make out a plan. I have to be carried along, and that means I don't know where I am going to end up. For example, I didn't know at all how Don't Move would end up. Writing is sometimes like being thefirst man to come out of the first cave and make the first mark on a rock."
Don't Move, by Margaret Mazzantini, is published by Vintage, £6.99