Cleansing Words: A Conversation between Maddalena Fingerle and Caterina Romeo

Maddalena Fingerle was born in Bolzano to Italian parents; she now lives in the Allgäu region in Southern Germany and works as a researcher in Munich, where she recently earned a doctorate in Italian literature on allegory and disguise in Torquato Tasso and Giovan Battista Marino (the monograph resulting from her research, entitled Lascivia mascherata [Masked Lasciviousness] was published by DeGruyter, see Fingerle 2022b). Her first novel, Lingua madre [Mother Tongue] (Italo Svevo Edizioni, 2021a), was awarded the Premio Italo Calvino, which brought her to the attention of critics, as well as the Premio Comisso Under 35, the Premio Internazionale Flaiano Under 35, the Premio Letterario Città di Girifalco, the Premio Fondazione Megamark, and the Premio Opera Prima of the Fondazione Arnoldo e Alberto Mondadori. Lingua madre was recently translated into German and published in Germany with the title Muttersprache (Folio Verlag, 2022a). The protagonist of the novel is Paolo Prescher, a boy and then young man from Bolzano who is obsessed with words and with the impossibility of keeping them clean. He feels stifled by the lack of authenticity of both his family – with the exclusion of his father – and the city in which he lives, where only superficial attention is paid to the cultural differences of the territory that are a consequence of its history. The importance given to appearance has emptied words of their meaning and irreparably soiled them, and Paolo obsessively tries to cleanse them, while at the same time he rejects identity affiliations that do not acknowledge multiplicity.