“Monsieur Malausséne” isn’t afraid of the Wolf

“Stefano Benni was more than a friend to me; he was my therapist”.

The friendship between French writer Daniel Pennac and Italian writer, journalist and poet Stefano Benni began when Benni convinced Feltrinelli publishing house to translate Pennac’s book The Fairy Gunmother (La fée carabine), the second masterpiece of the Malaussène saga, into Italian. From then on, each author introduced the other’s new work in their respective countries.

Together with Gigio Alberti, Pako Ioffredo and Ingrid Sanson, Pennac takes the stage at Festivaletteratura for a tribute to Benni, who passed away in September last year, and presents a theatrical reading of one of his most bizarre and famous works, Stranalandia (1984).

Bolognese author Benni's novels and stories offer a sharp satire of Italian society, imaginary worlds populated with bumbling heroes, grotesque antiheroes, and, as in the case of Stranalandia, mythical animals. This weird bestiary catalogues strange, funny, and unsettling beings discovered on an invented island by Stephen Lupus (the author's pseudonym) and Achilles Kunbertus (the illustrator, Pirro Cuniberti). Fish which have grown feet because the ocean does not exist, a dog who is a skilled tango dancer, a babonzo who grows smaller instead of bigger, a sparrow that sings love songs, a mouse that produces insane amounts of poop. In Stranalandia, everything is comic and unusual.

“Stefano was such a good therapist that the first thing he did after ascending to paradise was to open a psychoanalytic practice, even there", Pennac dreams. His first client was an angel; the second was God, who candidly admitted that, if he could travel back to the seven days of Creation, he would toil even on Sunday, just to make men less angry and mean.