In two weeks’ time, a group of BookMachine-goers will be joining the TLS in London for an event which focuses on small, independent presses and the current trend which has seen a 79% increase in sales by sixty of the UK’s smallest publishers. Here Norah Myers interviews the event host Thea Lenarduzz. Thea is commissioning editor at the TLS and the co-host of Freedom, Books, Flowers and the Moon, the TLS’s weekly podcast. She is also a freelance writer and, slightly sporadically, the literary editor at Five Books. 1. Small independent presses have been experiencing an increase in sales. What difference does this make for you as an editor? Avrebbe desiderato dare un bambino ad Antonio Maria Cervi per compensarlo dell'inconsolabile lutto per la morte dell fratello Annunzio, poeta, caduto giovanissimo in guerra. Il bambino avrebbe infatti dovuto chiamarsi Annunzio.” ([Antonia Pozzi] would have liked to give a child to Antonio Maria Cervi to make up for the inconsolable loss of the death of Cervi’s brother Annunzio, a poet who died very young during the war. In fact, the child would have been called Annunzio.” In “Note.” Antonia Pozzi:Tutte le opera, edited by Alessandra Cenni, p. 609. Well, in terms of writing, it’s that thing: write what you know—or, as it often happens, think you know. Also, by writing about what’s close to you, that you see every day, and trying to see it differently. Tilting it slightly and seeing it from a different angle. Writing focuses you in a different way. Wow I don’t think I can overstate how much of an impression Dandelions has had on me: being British Italian myself, I’ve never seen a book devoted to the exploration of such complicated identity(ies) that I find myself torn between on a daily basis. I was moved to tears (a rarity) when Lena articulated her emotions at passport control. Throughout I cherished the tenderness in Lena’s interactions with her Nonna and, it has taken me some time to digest as this made me deeply miss my own Nonna.

In The Cazalet Chronicles, part of the way Howard can do that is by really developing the characters, giving us multiple sides and levels. In a memoir, if the author is talking about someone else, it’s usually about what that other person did to them; how things looked from where they were sitting, figuratively speaking. Whereas with the novel, those other people can talk for themselves. And that makes for a much more lifelike experience, I think. Howard said novels were for showing people what other people are like. A traffic warden in Cheetham Hill Bury Old Road. September 1956. Photo: WATFORD/Mirrorpix/Getty Images. Experience becomes language becomes story becomes identity, and everyone’s place is settled. Each family has its own ‘dictionary of our past’. And then suddenly—really suddenly—the country opened up. Democracy arrived! People could vote! Go to church! Do whatever they wanted! And it was great. Or was it? Problems soon came, money ran out, violence erupted; there was mass disillusionment. ‘Freedom,’ it seemed, was not that great after all. Double-underlining denotes loud agreement or, I suppose, relish. I mark-up books like other people write diaries: performatively, with future readers in mind.In a series of novels, there is opportunity for these things to breathe, to happen as if in real-time. It’s not compressed into a single novel. So you can see the distance between cause and consequence. As a result, it feels that much truer to life. Hilary Mantel described how the book charted the varying and repeating errors of this one family; I think that’s a good way to describe it. Because when you read them as a whole, it’s like a musical composition that has its own rhythm. These impulses and decisions just happen again and again and again, in different forms. There’s an overarching pattern. It’s probably mid-morning on a Sunday, not long after Mass at St Robert’s Roman Catholic Church on Hamilton Road, where the priest always stops her after the service to thank her for the cake, ask after the boys, or to see if she would like to help with a new family just settling into the area. Any other day, she’d be curved over the sewing machine. The shops are closed so there aren’t many people about. Those who are tend to look over with furrowed brows and perhaps a shake of the head, before moving on. They’re not sure what this woman is up to – has she lost something? – but they know they wouldn’t be caught dead rooting around where stray cats and dogs and Godknowswhat do their business. Now she is alone, but often there is a boy, too – probably no older than twelve, the age at which he starts to think twice about these family customs. His skin is darker than hers, which has its own subtle olive hue, and this causes him grief at school. They have many names for him. In 1923, a year into his reign, Mussolini put his characteristic spin on an edict from the late 1800s and declared war on the putrid waters. I wonder if he didn’t feel a particular outrage because malaria was a disease that contaminated good Italian blood. The second book about family history that you want to recommend is a novel from another Italian writer, Elena Ferrante’s Lying Life of Adults. Ferrante is probably best known for her Neapolitan Quartet. Why have you selected this newer novel? This charmingly candid account of the tensions between an English present and an Italian past is also a fascinating family saga, teeming with idiosyncratic life and bringing with it a chunk of history that still conditions both countries today.’

It was as though I was meeting Nonna for the first time. I asked countless questions – general, first-date type ones like: “Who was your favourite author?”, and personal ones like, “What did your dad smell like?” Some made her laugh, others brought anguish, still fresh after half a century or more.Beautifully observed and written with heart and an infectious curiosity, Thea Lenarduzzi’s Dandelions parses the complex ways in which we live out our histories and carry the past within us, through ritual, food, language and legend. Like rifling through an overflowing drawer or opening an ancient photo album, Lenarduzzi unearths glinting gems of family fiction, introducing us to a shifting cast of memorable characters whose journeys, stories and passions it’s our joy to share.’ She kept repeating the word to herself – ‘betta’ like the Queen, ‘la regina Elisabetta’ – until the evening, when she could ask the landlady what it meant. Since Roman times, the plan had been to drain the swamps, to render them inhabitable and agriculturally useful. But successes were few and short-lived. Some say the fall of the Roman Empire can be linked to a particularly bad outbreak of malaria, or “Roman Fever,” as it was then known. (I write this a few months after the Italian government collapsed in disagreement over how to handle our own pandemic; the country is now on its sixty-ninth government since the end of the Second World War.) In Pozzi we see an essential early to mid-20 th–century female experience similar to that with which we associate poet Sylvia Plath: recognizing that her gender poses challenges to her goals, a woman navigates the path between achievement and resignation. It’s taken time for Italian readers to appreciate that, but now I don’t think there would be any question that she’s one of the great twentieth-century writers. She’s really having a heyday now.

As well as the fictionalising that takes place in our own memories, real events often pass into something like family lore or legend. Writer and longtime TLS editor Thea Lenarduzzi joins Kate Wolf and Medaya Ocher to speak about her debut book Dandelions, a winner of the Fitzcarraldo Editions Essay Prize. Weaving together memoir, history, and criticism, Dandelions explores the life of Lenarduzzi’s grandmother, Dirce, a totemic figure in her family who was born almost a century ago into Mussolini’s Italy. Political and economic circumstances, as well as personal tragedy, force Dirce to leave Italy for England, first as a child and later as an adult. Migration becomes one of the central realities of her life, and subsequently the life of her son and then Lenarduzzi herself. But even as the conditions of these moves between countries grow less critical, the difficulties of immigrating remain, complicating and splintering a sense of identity and home, foregrounding difference, and calling belonging into question. Lenarduzzi portrays the gravity of what for so many across the world is still the most dire of decisions, tracing the effect emigrating can have over multiple generations, while also finding inspiration in her family’s resiliency and the stories they leave behind. The dialogue in these books is incredible. Especially the children, she writes children’s dialogue so acutely, so well. But again, it’s the details, like Ginzburg. How people eat: whether someone passes the gravy or just pours it all onto their own plate. That can be as clear an indication of character as whether they were fascist or not, or whether they supported Chamberlain’s appeasement policy or not. All immigrants have narratives in which the mundane is ripe with symbolism, centred on moments in which the difference between them and us, the natives and the newcomers, are somehow distilled. We recycle abstruse parables, pass them down the generations, and find in them nourishment, confirmation of something never fully articulated. We keep the lines of the stories more or less straight, because embellishment, like questions, only complicates.With respect to linguistic idiosyncrasies, I loved the influence of Natalia Ginzburg which is felt throughout in Lenarduzzi’s work as she introduces phrases at first with translation and then when they come up again the reader is already so familiar with them that they have entered into the reader’s lexicon and rightly do not need for translations to be reiterated. Initially, it was slightly irritating for me as an Italian speaker to have to skip over the English translation but I am thrilled that Lena didn’t opt to merely render her conversations with her Nonna into English and made this accessible for non-Italian speakers and I am even more thrilled to see furlan/friulano included in an English-language publication. Moreover, overall I think this approach nicely echoed Natalia Ginzburg’s approach to introducing her own family’s sayings in Lessico Famigliare. Totally. I think it’s very interesting that she’s having this revival. It was the hundredth anniversary of her birth a few years ago, and there were lots of reissues going on, fresh translations. But when Natalia Ginzburg first started writing there was a lot of snobbery about the way that she wrote—certainly in Italy—because she wrote about things so plainly. There were none of the more flowery textures in her writing that Italians at the time tended to think marked out great literature. She was stripping it bare. So that an elderly person, alive when Mussolini was at the height of his powers, can now turn to someone, as casual as anything, and say “Oh, but he did good things too, you know? He cleared the swamps! He gave us jobs! The trains always ran on time!;” and the other person—young, perhaps on the eve of casting their first vote—can answer “Yes, I know he did. I’ve seen it online.” An ember can reignite, a new viral strain or infection can take hold, a fresh buzzword or slogan can capture the people’s imagination. And it may feel like the lucidity of morning, but in fact the cool restorative night never came in the first place.