Apart from the Strega Prize – for which he was said to have refused to compete – Daniele Del Giudice, who died Thursday, September 2 in Venice, had gleaned all the greatest Italian literary awards. He left two days too early, however, to receive the most prestigious of them, the Campiello Prize, which crowned his body of work, and which was due to be presented to him on Saturday, September 4. With him, Italy loses a prominent figure in its literary and cultural scene. Daniele Del Giudice was 72 years old.
It was the great Italo Calvino (1923-1985) who launched it in the early 1980s. In his preface to Daniele Del Giudice’s first novel, Wimbledon Stadium (1983, Rivages, 1985), the author of Perched Baron (1957) wondered how to talk about this newcomer and his “Unusual novel” : Should it be considered that it was reviving the tradition of the initiation story or, on the contrary, that it opened up new paths in the art of representing and telling? The greatness of Daniele Del Giudice, suggested Calvino, was precisely that he succeeded in doing, in a calm and deliberately neutral writing, both at the same time.
Engineer by training
Born July 11, 1949 in Rome, to an Italian mother and a Swiss father from Graubünden, Daniele Del Giudice did not have a happy childhood. Notably because he found himself orphaned very early on. Before he died, however, the latter had given him two gifts: a bicycle and a huge Underwood typewriter. So much so that instead of going to school, young Daniele spent most of his days pedaling in the morning and typing in the afternoon.
An engineer by training, he entered the world of letters by contributing to various newspapers, first in Milan then in Venice. In Wimbledon Stadium, it features a young man following in the footsteps of a mythical as well as enigmatic character, the mysterious Roberto Bazlen, a writer of the 1920s who died without ever having published a single line. Obsessed with the novelty of what he could produce, the strange Bazlen – who, in real life, was the friend of Italo Svevo and Umberto Saba – had ended up chiseling only notes of bottom of page in his notebooks, before giving up writing completely.
This subtle reflection on silence and the impediment to creation had inspired a film by Mathieu Amalric who, in 2001, signed the screenplay with the help of Daniele Del Giudice. In 2002, seventeen years after its initial release by Rivages, Seuil editions took over this work in French in a translation by René de Ceccaty. Cultivated prose combining depth and apparent lightness, astonishing precision of the pen where each word weighs its true weight: we find all these qualities in the following novels by Del Giudice, including Absolute pitch (Threshold, 1998), In the Reims museum (Seuil, 2003) or even Time merchants (Seuil, 2012), all translated by Jean-Paul Manganaro.
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