Thanks to Diego Zandel's reviews, OBC Transeuropa readers can keep up to date with much of the fiction that comes out in bookstores and is connected to the Balkans. But Diego is not only this, he is first and foremost a writer himself and a tireless cultural animator. We interviewed him on the occasion of the reprint of two of his novels. 

Both Operazione Venere and Crociera pericolo – recently published by Oltre Edizioni – are two re-editions of the novels published in the historic Segretissimo series by Mondadori and are part of the so-called Esperia trilogy. What does this vessel represent?

 

I consider the two novels “entertainment,” to use the same category that Graham Greene, a writer I particularly loved, used for his more commercial works. You rightly recalled that the two novels originally came out in Mondadori’s weekly pulp spy-story series Segretissimo. It’s also curious how they came about. The Berlin Wall had just fallen, which represented somewhat symbolically what was called the Iron Curtain between the capitalist West and the communist East, a division of the world that saw the clash between the Western secret services, in particular the American CIA or the English MI5 or MI6 on one side, and the communist secret services, in particular the Soviet KGB, on the other.

At that point, the genre fiction itself was affected by the crisis, and therefore the Segretissimo series. So, to take cover, the then director of Segretissimo and Gialli Mondadori, Gian Franco Orsi, called, among others, me, who had already written “Massacro per un presidente”, published by Mondadori in the Italian fiction series, one of the first novels on Italian terrorism in which the Italian secret services also appeared, to ask me if I was available to write spy stories for his series. I accepted the bet. Orsi also told me that readers of the series were particularly fond of series with the same characters. So I invented a cruise ship – and I come to your curiosity – which I called “Esperia” which was the name of a ship of the Adriatica Navigazione, a company my father worked for and the ship on which, way back in 1972, I had taken my honeymoon in the eastern Mediterranean. As regular characters I put the captain and the officers of the ship, among whom stands out the Fiume refugee Rudi Hagendorfer, called Hag, a surname taken from my neighbors in the refugee camp in Rome where I ended up with my parents after the one in Servigliano, where I was born, and the maitre, a former Greek wrestling champion, Stavros Xenicos, to whom I gave the surname of the Greek mother of my first wife, now deceased. Three novels would have come out of the series: in addition to “Crociera pericolo” and “Operazione Venere”, “L'uomo di Kos”, the latter however with Hobby&Work in hardback edition. As for the themes, in this case too, they are always mine: Istria and Fiume, the Balkans, Greece, or rather the lands linked to my life.

 

In an interview you declared a “predilection for the adventure genre” of these novels, accompanied by a “political gaze”. How are these two aspects linked and how did you arrive at the thriller genre?

 

Your question brings me back to my favorite authors, Graham Greene and Eric Ambler, whose novels have this characteristic: they combine adventure with politics, and both are lived in the direction of a search, that of freedom, of emancipation from something that hinders the free manifestation of one's existence. At this point, the comparison with the historical context that conditions the places and the protagonists in the field is inevitable. I don't know whether my predilection for these authors and their novels stems from the adventurous scenario that has left its imprint on my life, very much determined by the history and political context in which I was born and raised - the son of Fiume exiles who had adventurously escaped from Tito's Yugoslavia, the fact of having been born and raised in a refugee camp, inhabited by people who felt like victims of History and politics, with half the family living beyond the then Iron Curtain, with stories that allowed a child to glimpse a different world, of mysteries, secrets, conflicts, spies, the cosmopolitan world of the frontier - or from other motivations, exclusively literary, as others may like fantasy or romance novels.

It should be added that, perhaps not by chance, I married, very young, a woman of Greek origin who practically introduced me to and made me love a world like the Greek one and more generally the Levantine one of the Dodecanese, also politically turbulent, also a frontier world, which ended up grafting itself onto the one I came from. It is no coincidence that there is a third writer, also English, whose books have influenced me. I am talking about Lawrence Durrell, who had fascinated me in particular with his Alexandria Quartet, or rather the tetralogy of novels set in the Levantine and cosmopolitan Alexandria of Egypt of the late thirties and early forties, in which I found all the ingredients that nourish my imagination and constitute my interests.

 

Mystery and thriller are genres that are always very popular with the public but they don't always find space outside of some niches. Why is this in your opinion? Have they gone out of fashion?

 

I believe this was true as long as there were specific, easily identifiable series for thrillers and detective novels, such as Gialli Mondadori or Gialli Garzanti or Segretissimo itself for spy stories, and which therefore ended up attracting only the genre-loving public, even reducing, with their packaging, to a “genre” even novels of undoubted literary profile. I give you the example of Eric Ambler. For years his novels were published in genre series, Segretissimo itself or in Gialli Garzanti, so his literary qualities were not even taken into consideration. The habit, in a certain sense, made the man, and the true reality that was under the cassock escaped.

Now that Eric Ambler is published in the refined Adelphi editions, no one would dream of reducing to a genre novels like “The Schirmer Legacy” or “The Delchev Trial” and the others that have gradually come out with this publishing imprint, while I loved them as literary works already when I read them in the Garzanti Gialli series. But the same can be said of Simenon. Today this ghettoization no longer exists. Indeed, the detective novel, which is now preferred to be defined in the French “noir”, is the novel that thanks to some authors – ranging from Loriano Macchiavelli to Massimo Carlotto to Giancarlo De Cataldo to Carofiglio and others – best represents the social reality we live in. I would say instead that these are the ones that are most in fashion today.

 

The places in your books are never random: Cyprus and Kos are just two examples of places to which you yourself declare your connection, with much of the Mediterranean. Why do the islands of our sea fascinate us so much? Are there still forgotten stories to tell?

 

I am linked to places by my biography. The fact that some of these are islands is pure coincidence, even if it is true that the island offers those who live there the feeling of being a separate world, from which you have no other escape routes than the sea or the wings of Icarus. By knowing them intimately, you discover many forgotten stories. For example, my novel “The Greek Brother” was born from a story dating back to the German occupation of the island of Kos, at the time under Italian administration, like the entire Dodecanese, which passed under Italian jurisdiction after over 400 years of Ottoman domination following the Italo-Turkish war won by Italy in 1912.

The Germans occupied the island in early October 1943 after a 48-hour battle against the Italian soldiers, including my future father-in-law, who were guarding it, not hesitating, once they had conquered the island, to kill, in retaliation, 103, maybe 106, Italian officers, 66 bodies of which or what remained of them were later found years later in the marshes of a place on the island called Linopoti. “The Greek Brother” takes its cue from that tragic event, which Italy has completely and shamefully removed, as if those 106 officers were not there for Italy, and then developed according to its own idea, but which brings us back to the risks experienced and the protection received by the Greeks of those soldiers who were hiding from the German hunt for Italian soldiers who had escaped captivity (this was not the fate of my father-in-law who ended up in a concentration camp in Germany). But, to stop at those 106 officers, no Italian government since the war has ever provided for dedicating, not just a monument, but a stele, a plaque in their memory. Only the Greek municipality of Kos in 1992 placed a large plaque in the Catholic cemetery of the island with the names and surnames, in strict alphabetical order, of the massacred officers. At the inauguration not a single representative of the Italian government showed up, representing Italy were only two elderly members of the Association of Italian Veterans of the Aegean.

 

In your production, however, there is room for the most varied genres: there is no shortage of novels, but also essays. In which area do you feel most at ease now?

 

My non-fiction comes from my journalistic activity, not from academic studies. It is the child only of the passion for the subject I deal with, in particular the Balkans, its authors, and the world that their works represent. I remain decidedly a narrator. Of the 18 books published so far, the essays, if we do not want to include among them also the autobiographical “Manuale sentimentale dell'isola di Kos”, are three, one on Andrić, co-written with Giacomo Scotti, another, entitled “Balcanica” which collects most of my reviews of books by Balkan authors or books on the Balkans written over many years for various publications, especially for OBC Transeuropa, and a book like “Apologia della lettura”, from last year, which ranges over another passion of mine: books, reading them and making them, not only mine, but also those of others. For years I have been a “professional reader” for the publishing houses Mondadori, Rusconi and Bompiani, while today I edit some series for a small publishing group in Liguria, that of Oltre Edizioni, which also includes the publishing houses Gammarò and Töpffer. It is a pleasure that, at 73 years of age, I allow myself thanks to the friendship and mutual respect with the publisher Paolo Paganetto who gives me carte blanche in the choice of authors and works to publish.

 

Your origins, as you often state, are perhaps the most present aspect in your production. How do they enter and on which aspects do you think it is most important to focus?

 

I am my origins. Not only the exile and the refugee camp and the fact that I was raised, from the cradle – which, it should be emphasized, was an orange crate – by an Istro-Croatian grandmother, following the hospitalization in a sanatorium, immediately after my birth, of my mother, who was ill with tuberculosis. But also for the family background that I have behind me, starting with the founder, my great-grandfather Carlo Zandl, without the e, son of an Austrian single mother, Maria Zandl, who abandoned him four days after his baptism at the wheel of the main hospital in Trieste, and then given him up for adoption, with the adjusted surname of Zandel, to an Istro-Croatian family in the area of ​​Albona. Married to Olivia Frankovich, he would have given birth to 7 sons, thus starting a vast progeny that today, in addition to Istria, between exiles and emigrations, is scattered all over the world, but that, extraordinarily, is linked by a strong sense of belonging that goes beyond continents, borders and languages ​​that each of us speaks. A family that, in my personal case, has found another blood shore, if I think of my children, even in Greece, which I love as my own land and which I consider a source of ever new literary ideas.

 

What are you working on now? Are there any upcoming releases on the horizon?

 

I finished a novel inspired by the trial of Oskar Piškulić, the head of Ozna in Rijeka, Tito's political police, accused of murdering autonomists and anti-fascists, Rijeka residents Giuseppe Sincich, Nevio Skull and Mario Blasich and others, which took place on the same day as the Titoites' entry into the city. The trial, held in Rome, in its various stages, from 1997 to 2004, was at the center of controversy, demonstrations, protests by the Croatian and Slovenian Foreign Ministers, and parliamentary questions, to the point of being, in my opinion, somehow conditioned by it. Hence the idea of ​​a story with strong noir overtones that I consider compelling and, as they say, full of suspense, as well as interesting from a historical and political point of view. On the same story I also wrote a recital with Laura Marchig, a writer from the Italian minority in Rijeka, entitled "Trial of Piškulić, the executioner of autonomists. Who is afraid of the Free State of Fiume?” which we performed in Turin in 2019. The novel is now in the hands of my good literary agent who will take care of its publication, which I hope will happen within the next year.

Interview by Veronica Tosetti a Diego Zandel – 14/09/2021

Source: Osservatorio Balcani e Caucaso Transeuropa