Custodians and captives
Niccolò Ammaniti is an Italian author, director and screenwriter, famous for his novel Io non ho paura (I’m not scared) and winner of Premio Strega in 2007 for Come Dio comanda (As God Commands). In Piazza Castello, Mantua, during Festivaletteratura, Ammaniti discussed his latest novel, Il custode (The Custodian) with Italian writer Gaia Manzini. The two writers touched on the main themes of this book, as well as of Ammaniti’s other work, such as puberty and adolescence, fear and horror stories.
In Ammaniti’s books, the disturbing, unsettling material of the story stands in sharp contrast to the tone he adopts and the gaze through which his protagonists (usually thirteen-year-old boys) view these realities. This gaze provides a sort of enchantment – typical of puberty, of boyhood – and a complete absence of prejudice.
However, Nilo Vasciaveo, the protagonist of this book, differs from other teenage boys in Ammaniti’s fiction, as he was born into a secret, a family tradition: a mysterious mythological creature lives inside his house, pacing back and forth in his bathroom. This creature, which to his family is “damnation and salvation at the same time”, must be guarded, tying Nilo to his small Sicilian village, Triscina, from which he cannot escape.
The novel examines the double nature of the idea of custody, of guarding (Italian custodire): to protect or guard something, or to be held captive, like a jailer who spends every day inside a prison to guard its cells. And, like the teenager he is, Nilo wants to break free. Adolescence, Ammaniti suggests, is a fascinating time, precisely because it offers “glimpses where everything feels possible”, and, for Nilo, this sense of freedom comes from newly awakened sexual impulses, which lead him to see family duty as an unbearable sacrifice and to dream of a new life away from Triscina together with Arianna, the woman he falls in love with. Yet this love too, carrying the urgency of adolescent passion, can turn him into the very custodian he no longer wants to be – transforming a space of freedom into one of constriction.
Lastly, Manzini and Ammaniti discussed the author’s fascination with mythology. Ammaniti links the enduring presence of myths and archetypes to the effect of dreams, as a dimension where unrelated things melt into one another, giving birth to monsters. This fusion lies at the root of fear and mystery: it is a fantasy that both frightens and captivates, nourished by bedtime stories, by literature, and, once again, by Ammaniti's own books.
