Guia Risari

• Name — Guia Risari • Born — 14 August 1971 • Birthplace — Milan • Occupation — novelist, essayist, translator • Language — Italian, English, French, Spanish • Citizenship — Italian • Education — Academic degree • Alma Mater — University of Milan • Website — guiarisari.com

Born in Milan, Guia Risari graduated from the Liceo Parini in 1990. She went on to study Ethics at university, getting her degree in 1995 with a thesis on Jean Améry, at the same time working as a journalist for l'Unità and as an educationalist; she also took part as a volunteer in the humanitarian mission at the refugee camp of Klana. Risari then took up an in-depth study of antisemitism, getting a master's degree in "Modern Jewish Studies" in 1997 from the University of Leeds. Beginning in 1998, she spent a long period in France to continue her studies in Montpellier, Toulouse and Paris. Between 1999 and 2008 she divided her time between the Sorbonne and Sapienza University of Rome. In the same period, she worked as a librarian, teacher, translator, journalist, writer and lecturer, while never abandoning her work as a volunteer. Guia Risari is often the translator of her own works, which are published in various languages. Her studies, along with Surrealism, a sensitivity towards minorities and her regard for children are all re-elaborated in her writing, to which she has devoted herself since 2001.

With the exception of her translations and essays, Guia Risari’s writings are usually accompanied by illustrations created by different artists: for example, the colors of Elisa Macellari for Il decamerino or Cecco Mariniello for Pane e oro and La macchina di Celestino, the collages of Marc Taeger for Achille il puntino, or the pencil drawings of Arianna Floris for La porta di Anna. Il pesce spada e la serratura is illustrated by Altan and recalls the Surrealistic game of exquisite corpses. Il taccuino di Simone Weil is accompanied by the illustrations of Pia Valentinis. The novel tells the true story of Simone Weil and the historical scenario in which she lived, in the form of an imaginary diary. Published in an artisan printing house, and furnished with a bookmark, the volume is presented in the style of a real diary: the pages are "in natural paper made of cotton fibres” and the binding is held together with elastic. La terre respire, with watercolors by Alessandro Sanna, represents "a hymn to the power of nature"; Le chat âme, illustrated by Ghislaine Herbéra, narrates the story of a cat, regarded as an “animal-guide, a sort of ancestral double”; Le Petit Chaperon bleu, with pictures by Clémence Pollet, is a "Surreal version of Little Red Riding Hood". The interaction between writing and graphics and the supervision of the edition, typical of book arts, are also the very characteristics of Surrealism, especially feminine surrealism. Similarly, elements common to literary works of feminine Surrealism are the artists’ book, interdisciplinary features, the use of fairy-tales populated by magical creatures and cats regarded as alter egos, the attention given to nature and recourse to the imagination and writing in order to combat negativity and racial prejudice.

Guia Risari dealt with anti-Semitism from a philosophical point of view during her academic studies in Leeds, going on to analyze the characteristics of Italian anti-Semitism through the work of Giorgio Bassani. Risari makes reference, above all, to the critical approach of the Frankfurt School and the analyses carried out by Zygmunt Bauman on the relationship between modernity and the Holocaust, on the basis of which the characteristics of recent times (order, homogeneity and function) have aggravated the ancient prejudice against the Jews, always regarded as the “other”, “different”, to be isolated and destroyed. For the first time, the bureaucratic machine takes on that task, relieving the individual of responsibility. Approaching Il romanzo di Ferrara by Bassani, Guia Risari also takes into consideration the literary testimony of the Holocaust. The literature of the Holocaust, through various phases from diaries to essays, poetry and stories, is transformed into an instrument of commemoration, interpretation and elaboration of the events and traumas. In Romanzo di Ferrara, Risari recognizes the complexity of a work that is “at the same time an historical narrative and a personal document”, in which Bassani is both a “reporter and witness, describing with increasing awareness the scene of a personal and collective trauma”, yet maintaining a calm tone. The emphasis of Bassani, in fact, is on the need to preserve the memory of an event, the Holocaust, which has stained a part of humanity, and not on the commiseration of the victims nor the cruelty of the tormentors: in other words, what counts is the right to exist of every living being. In The document within the walls, written in English, Guia Risari probes Bassani’s narrative with accuracy, even verifying the number of those who died on the Lapide di via Mazzini, and utilizing an interpretive model that puts to good use the means of both literary and social criticism. The aim of her research is to examine anti-Semitism in Italy during the Fascist period as it is described in Romanzo di Ferrara, which should be regarded as “not a simple collection of stories but rather a true document” about Jewish integration and Italian betrayal, about the Fascist persecution and the painful disillusion of the victims. The writer expresses doubts about the “myth of good Italians” that is based on the fact that the Italian persecution of Jews was less ferocious than that of the Nazis. In Jean Améry. Il risentimento come morale, a work derived from her graduate thesis and for which Guia Risari won five awards, the writer suggests a re-evaluation of the idea of resentment, which she considers “the only way to moralize life and history”. The resentment of the survivors of the concentration camps is indicated as the only way to emend history, without forgetting or pardoning it, and is reassessed in the wake of Adorno and Horkheimer; i.e. it is freed from being a pathological or unsound reaction. Améry makes public his resentment with no false modesty: “the fundamental insight of Améry consists precisely in having understood the complex ambivalence of resentment, which is the refusal of the present and, at the same time, an emotional and existential bond with the past”, a "multiform revolt of the soul, which makes it possible to save and revive the memory of the offence without obscuring the use of critical reason". The necessity of not forgetting is taken up again in the introductory essay by Guia Risari for the Italian edition of Le sang du ciel by Piotr Rawicz (translated by the same Risari), which reintroduces the double role of the writer as witness and narrator of the Holocaust, reasserting the importance of giving voice to the pain caused by others for no reason so that it will not be forgotten.