Tasmania is an island in the Pacific where, according to data from a scientific study, refuge can be found when survival on Earth begins to be almost impossible. But Paolo Giordano has not lost anything there, despite the fact that his latest novel is titled that way, Tasmania (Tusquets / Edicions 62), and one of the characters points to that possibility: “It doesn't seem urgent to me to go live in Tasmania.” ", he says, ironically, in an interview for La Vanguardia done in Barcelona.
The author of the celebrated The Solitude of Prime Numbers (2008) is interested in the here and now and his new novel is a fresco in which he addresses, in addition to the climate crisis, the fear of jihadist terrorism, relationship crises, the havoc of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombs (and the ethical debate about whether they should have been launched), machismo, the cracks in the faith of a priest friend, the small miseries of journalism... All of this, in a work that mixes styles: the essay, the novel in its purest form, the story or the journalistic report. Written from autofiction? “Perhaps what makes the journalist most like me is his interiority; “His soul is quite similar to mine,” he admits.
The result is a work that seems washed out; but it only seems that way: “In reality, the book is very structured, but I wanted the reader to feel like getting lost in the reading, as if everything were the result of chance and they encountered different situations.” As happens in today's life, it is diverse and comes to us in informative portions. “It's like taking only a section of the protagonist's life, with his partner, with the other characters as well, and seeing that some relationships have already begun, others will continue to develop later, as happens in life, and I only narrate a fragment. I was interested in explaining the events in a partial way, as if I were cutting them from a larger sheet, far from the classic scheme of the beginning, development and outcome of novels.”
The book, which begins at the end of 2015 and ends at the beginning of 2020, is a catalog of crises. “And there is none that is resolved,” adds Giordano. Circumstance that adds a strong feeling of instability to the whole. “This is the reason why I talk so much about clouds – in the work, the physicist Jacopo Novelli teaches the protagonist to identify them – and it is because they have that variable, elusive appearance. It seemed to me the most contemporary, most authentic approach, taking into account how we all live today.”
The women who appear in the work seem to have things clearer than the men and, instead of being in the clouds, they have their feet on the ground: “In the novel it is like that, without a doubt, although not with my partner in “real life,” he jokes. And in the pages of Tasmania, machismo is evident: “At this moment I see the feminine as more determined and it seems to me that we are immersed in a crisis of the masculine paradigm. At last! “We had to wait a long time!”
Giordano is bothered by the fact that the sexist discourse wants to play the victim when it is the culprit of women's inequality: “I have come across interviews here, in Spain, where many journalists talk about cancellation when referring to my book, when for me the “The pages of my book talk much more about machismo than about cancellation.”
A formula, that of victimization, that is used by the right and the extreme right, and that deeply irritates the author: “That of the executioner who becomes a victim, is a very common practice, something very common in the current political debate, as It is in issues like the climate, where now, suddenly, we are the victims of something that we have caused... and we are surprised!
