Porca Miseria. That’s what his father belched out when he bumped into a door after supper, before collapsing in bed, dead drunk. Relieving the rest of the family of his presence, allowing him to regain speech and a semblance of cheerfulness.
“I can go back in time, I do not remember my father on an empty stomach”, writes Tonino Benacquista in an autobiographical account aptly titled Porca Miseria — an Italian swear word that could literally be translated as “poor misery”.
“Talking about me was the first time I did it and it will certainly be the last”, assures Tonino Benacquista, reached by telephone in Paris. This autobiographical story, a mixture of memoirs and family novels, will only be a parenthesis in his work. “My life in itself is not of much interest, he thinks. But talking about oneself is also talking about many other things. Of popular culture, of dual culture, of a sense of belonging, of identity, of uprooting. »
Even if all his novels, he also points out, contain an autobiographical part. He who took on odd jobs in his thirties, who was, among other things, a night guide in sleeping cars between France and Italy (The misdeal of sleepers1989) and eye-catching paintings in a contemporary art gallery (Three red squares on a black background1990).
Born in 1961 in Choisy-le-Roi, to Italian parents, Elena and Cesare, originally from Latium, who had emigrated to this town in the southern crown of Paris in 1954, the author of Malvita (2004) goes back to the sources. This immigration, to which his mother had had to resign herself, constitutes in a way the “original fault”. His parents were never able to master the French language, his mother even being “incapable of a complete sentence at the baker’s”. Little Tonino quickly served as an interface between his parents and the rest of the world.
Between the vociferous paternal alcoholism and the silent resignation of his mother, two poisons, Benacquista thus retraces his path strewn with obstacles towards writing. From his birth in this modest family where there was not a book, until his late epiphany for reading in his mid-teens. From his first weapons in literature until this period of agoraphobia where, for twenty years, he wrote, “I treated my mother’s pathology through my father’s addiction”.
How to become a writer
And under the string of chosen memories, Porca Miseria appears as the story of a sort of miracle: how against all odds one becomes a writer.
Regularly, his mother handed him an unopened envelope from school. If she had known how to read, she would have come across these sentences: “Mediocre student. Disappointing results. Can do better. “Particularly bad at the oral, says the writer, we also often found the following mention:” Must prove himself in writing. »
“Writing is revenge”, writes Tonino Benacquista in Porca Miseria. But revenge for what exactly? “The corollary of this sentence, specifies the writer in an interview, I give it a little later in the book: for lack of repair, to write is to restore. It’s kind of the same idea. It can be to re-establish in one’s own words what one is or what one feels. Have access to speech, but in writing. Have time to formulate what you have to say. »
To overcome a certain inhibition through words, to circumvent a lack of legitimacy, a difficulty in expressing oneself with ease – which he himself has always experienced, he assures us. Take revenge on reality when it disappoints us or is insufficient.
For Tonino Benacquista, writing was also a way of contradicting fate. To refuse what seemed to be a foregone conclusion. “It is true that my brothers and sisters did not have any particular ambitions. I had one that they didn’t. It fell on me. I had this ambition and I didn’t budge from it: that is to say, it couldn’t be anything else. »
A “fixation” that set in from the moment when, at the end of adolescence, he discovered the Black Series, the mythical collection of post-war detective novels at Gallimard. “The rest of my life would only be a parenthesis while waiting to be able to live from my passion for storytelling,” he recalls.
What will happen to him in 1991 with The commedia of failureshis fourth novel, before he became an award-winning screenwriter, in particular for his work with Jacques Audiard (César for Best Screenplay for On my lips in 2002 and César for the best adaptation for The Beat That My Heart Skippedfour years later).
To tell, for lack of understanding
But to write, you had to read. And until he was forced to read A life de Maupassant, at fifteen, the resistance to reading was stronger than anything. At school, when he had no idea of the answers, he often answered exams with little fictions.
“And that’s also what I wanted to say to the reader, and why not to the young reader: here, it’s not because we are absolutely a lover of literature that we are going to put ourselves one day to write. For me, it took time. I also know that I wrote before having read,” he says. A paradox that is difficult to explain, he agrees, but Tonino Benacquista tries in his book to give some answers.
In his eyes as an adult, fiction “is telling, for lack of understanding”. “Telling is giving your version of the world, but without going through ideas and theses. Me, if I have something to say, I do it through situations, characters, twists and turns. When I create a situation in a novel, he continues, I offer it to the reader, who absorbs it and metabolizes it with his own experience. With his memory, his memories, his knowledge. And it echoes or not, but the drive does at least half the job. »
“I think fiction does that. It goes through emotion. From the moment we have been touched by a character, he cannot lie. »
The book is also a heartfelt tribute to France, land of immigration and welcome. “What other country would have given a child born of illiterate parents the taste for writing? he asks himself. At the end of Porca MiseriaTonino Benacquista indulges in a playful alternate history and imagines the history of his family in countries other than France (such as the United States or Italy).
“I think the only country where I would have become a writer is necessarily France,” he believes. This relationship to books and letters, I felt it in France. And I certainly met the right people at the right times, who encouraged me in this direction. »