Enrico Palandri

Biography

Palandri graduated with a degree in Dramaturgy from the DAMS (The Disciplines of Art, Music and Theatre) school at the University of Bologna, where he studied, among others, with Gianni Celati, Giuliano Scabia and Umberto Eco. During the Student Movement of 1977 he curated a book on Radio Alice, Fatti Nostri, together with Carlo Rovelli, Maurizio Torrealta and Claudio Piersanti. Palandri’s first novel, Boccalone, is also set in Bologna during this same timeframe. The novel was published in 1979 through L’erba voglio press, run by Elvio Fachinelli, and then republished various times by Feltrinelli and Bompiani. Palandri moved to London in 1980 and worked as a language coach for the Royal Opera House, as a journalist (collaborating with RAI, the BBC and numerous newspapers). In 1993, he was given a Writing Residency post at the University College (London). As of 2003, with diverse responsibilities, Palandri teaches in addition a semester each year at the Universita’ Ca’ Foscari Venezia, thanks to a Double Appointment agreement between Venezia and the UCL. He still holds the posts of Writer in Residence and Professor of Modern European Literature at the UCL. He has given talks on literature in numerous Anglo-Saxon countries and at other universities in South America, Russia, China and Taiwan. Palandri’s novels, articles and essays have appeared in multiple languages and have received numerous prizes (Fenice Europa, Dessi’, Mastronardi, etc.). In 2003, he was conferred the title of “Commendatore” in the Order of the Star of Italian Solidarity for his cultural contributions by President Carlo Azeglio Ciampi.

Publication History

After Boccalone, Palandri collaborated with Marco Bellocchio to write the script of the film Diavolo in Corpo (Devil in the Flesh) (1986). He then published six novels: Le pietre e il sale (English: Ages Apart) (1986), La via del ritorno (English: The Way Back) (1997), Le colpevoli ambiguita’ di Herbert Markus (1997), Angela prende il volo (2000), L’altra sera (English: The Other Evening) (2003), I fratelli minori (2010). In this cycle, such themes are explored as: “Historical events and social changes of great importance: from the student movement of 1977, to political terrorism, to the fall of the Berlin Wall to the radical changes imposed on European society due to the global phenomenon of migration.” (1) In addition to these novels, Palandri has written various short stories and other pieces published in newspapers and review journals, collected in large part in the volume Allegro fantastico (1993). Palandri has published, furthermore, two ballads in verse: La strega mia amica (English: Little Witch) (1986) and Orfeo a teatro (2007). He has also translated the following authors’ works into Italian: Eudora Welty, Robert McLiam Wilson and the brothers George and Weedon Grossmith.

Critical Contributions

Pier (2005, on Pier Vittorio Tondelli) and Primo Levi (2011, on the Piedmont writer of the same name) are a monograph and an anthology respectively, with prefaces and commentaries which contextualize the corpus of work written concerning the two Italian authors. The volumes La deriva romantica (2002) and Flow (2011) are, instead, books with a very strong theoretical focus. They discuss, in large part, questions relative to style, to the process of textual generation and the generation of metaphors, which are attributed to an independent vitality, not rhetoric but dynamically linked to content, and which qualifies literature. Flow begins with this phrase: “Poems and novels are the metaphors by which reality is brought into focus”. A single conversational flow is articulated through literary surfaces, in expression, and in profundity, in an atemporal dimension which creates cracks in those surfaces, which gives rise to the invention that the work is the space itself. In this volume, observations made in 16 appunti sulle metafore are added onto theoretical articulation, observations published and elaborated on various times in different contributing contexts before being collected in La deriva romantica. Lectures on diverse subjects given by Palandri at various universities have been published and are available online.

Works

Notes

(1) Minardi and Francioso, 2011.