Rick Moody, maximalist Yes, I am a maximalist . Rick Moody, New Yorker writer born in 1961, has a reassuring smile and eyes, but its pages with stories dripping
complex, often lived on a fine line and dangerous, and are supported by a powerful language and multi-faceted, light years away from standard of minimalism. In Italy to present his new book - "
three lives ", published by Minimum Fax editing Raymond Carver -, Moody admits that it failed
never wanted to follow the example of the great minimalist :" I never wanted to be a writer like this - told in Kilgore a pleasant meeting in Milan -. Since high school I was never a good minimalist, I can not be summarized and simplistic. " It just started reading "Three Lives" by realizing
. The novella that opens the book, "The Army Omega", it is a polished route into the madness of a paranoid old billionaire who, while fighting against disease and age-related personal problems, is to aware of a frightening conspiracy
and immediately engages in the first person to guarantee national security against enemies of the mysterious "dark-skinned
. The key to enter this dark world, Dr. Van Deusen finds in a novel of political fiction and his contact with the security forces is another old man who pretends to be a fisherman, but it is actually a secret agent. And this is just an incomplete summary
of the story.
Nothing could be more distant from the machinations of Carver skinny then, and thought that now runs to the masters of postmodernism, such as
the elusive Thomas Pynchon. "Alongside the tradition minimalist - Moody told us - there is another literary movement strongly influenced by Europe and the experimental literature that includes
Pynchon, but also Don DeLillo, William Gaddis . I feel closer to these writers and I have been trained by John Hawkes and Angela Carter, I feel more akin to their style. If this is maximalism then yes I am a maximalist. " As the definitions are always a bit 'limited, it is nevertheless true that Rick Moody
high points, both for the subjects of his stories and for the way he says. But when, again in "The Army Omega", the protagonist understands that should be its aim, that's the story turns from semi grotesque into something different, difficult to circumscribe
. It is Moody's prose that marks the difference with periods like this: "As we walk, I heard the whistle a couple of golf balls that I sped by, as small asteroids in the great unknown of this
this apocalyptic, but not I have paid the slightest attention. " Or, and here the link with the issues most dear to Pynchon and DeLillo is manifest, a little further on we read: "Perhaps the Fraulein was crying because he knew this life not keep anything of what he promised, that is to say that every human interaction was mediated the sad fact that there surrounded. " The context is not so important, because these phrases
own light shine.
style is central to the work of Rick Moody, and when asked how important it is for him
the "how" is written , the answer begins with a "not quite there arises the question" which sounds like a veiled charge to those who focus too much on story lines. "My idea - explains the writer - is that everyone has a
refined his style, Carver and Hemingway also pointed that, intentionally, to the maximum of restraint. My method is made up of long sentences, complex, full of adjectives and adverbs. " A choice of articulation of the language that fits well in the musical dimension
: "I give great importance - the writer has added - either the sound of the language, which joins the simple meaning of words." Sounds, rhythms, kaleidoscope of images that overlap in the long story that closes the book by Moody and Dave Eggers has selected for his anthology of adventure stories have appeared in Italy a few years ago: "
Albertine." A novel complex and visionary
memory and reality quoting Proust in the title but then somehow reinvented the science fiction genre in key
hallucinatory, in the groove in the tradition of Phil Dick. "The distinction between the genres of literature - Moody told us about those who consider children in certain types of writings and writers - is arbitrary and is not written anywhere. I believe that science fiction has the same dignity
literature 'traditional' and there are great science fiction writers that I consider great literary writers fully.
There is a continuum between literature 'high' and 'low' and novelists such as Dick, JG Ballard or William Gibson can not be pigeonholed in a genre definitions. Dick, for example, can be criticized for some sentence is not perfect, but his ideas are very strong
.
"Albertine", in the tradition of the best science-fiction, is nevertheless a story that speaks of our present, particularly the U.S. linked to 11 September. In a New York "
day after " depopulated a drug that has the same name of his beloved Proust, which remembers the past, the life that the explosions have blown away with the city. Everything is obviously much more complex and space-time between jumps, future advances, signs of drug resistance, Brooklyn and moments in which the protagonist can "
to recite all the poems I had learned in life ", you enter into a vortex of perceptions of gender definition and overrides everything seems to point towards the heart of the firm
literature, the place where the writer nuclear power to maneuver its demiurge creator. An interpretation that may override the intentions of Rick Moody, who, while appreciating it, brings us back to a level of reality: "The element of memory - the writer explained - comes from the feeling that after the September 11 public opinion U.S. is trying to forget much of the past political
, ie all responsibility for Americans who had helped to create the conditions for the attack terrorist. And at the same time, people wanted
remember what was there before the attacks on the World Trade Center . They tried to forget
some hard things and remember
other intensely, and the memory was like a treasure, but many parts were removed. In 'Albertine' I tried to make this feeling and this paradox. " The
fear, as pointed out by the editor of the book Martina Testa, is one of the red wires of the three stories and, on closer inspection, you feel those stories photographing a country adrift, lost in the maze of their
fears. "A year ago - said Rick Moody - The situation was exactly this, for as I saw it. But today they are much more hopeful for the developments we are seeing. " Developments that have a name and a surname:
Barack Obama. "It will be an election fought - Moody explained with great interest - but Obama has the chance to make and I support him. He has a good chance of winning, it would be wonderful if the did. " Obama likes to other writers, like Jonathan Safran Foer
, who recently told his political passion for the black senator also to the Italian press. Rick Moody adds its voice to Safran and is convinced that not only elites and intellectuals look sympathy with the Democratic candidate. "People are
with him - he said - true bases of popular support even if a certain band of white racists could lower classes to resist, especially in the Midwest. They are the ones who supported Hillary Clinton, but if we now make the ticket even this problem can be solved. "
Moody gets excited when he talks about Obama, but as a writer believes in the look sociological
more than in, shall we say, political science. "More than politics are interested in describing how people react to fear, for example. Do not try to tell the political atmosphere itself, even if the metaphor does indeed cover the conditions of my country. " Politics and literature, even in the case of an avid writer like Moody, are still different and distant objects
and is also perceived to be as the writer, while telling of paranoia, violence between colleagues or an alternate present and apocalyptic, it takes care of his characters. The look is never contemptuous and, indeed, seems to become more affectionate
As their situation became more complex and their conditions worse. "The moment of politics - he wanted to explain Moody - is a tool to evoke the psychology of the characters, their inner life and are therefore deserving of attention and affection of contempt, even if they represent political views that I do not agree. " And then, as Salinger brilliantly reminded us at the end of "The Catcher in the Rye",
the writer can not not become attached to the characters born from her story: "If you let a character tell his story for a long time - admitted Moody - it becomes impossible not to feel compassion, and this is the role of the writer. " Also a maximalist who declares proudly.
