Last month I received a legal letter accusing me of defamation. Someone who was very close to me for many years – but now is not – had read a piece of short fiction I had published and decided a minor character was about them. Like every writer ever born, I have gleaned sentences, character traits and events, and I’ve hodgepodged it all together to try and convey an emotional truth. It’s what we do, right? Never once had I considered defamation.
Other than penning some columns for L’Espresso, as he had been doing on a weekly or fortnightly basis for over thirty years, and releasing one more novel, Year Zero, his final public act was to found a new publishing house. He and his collaborators called it the ‘ship of Theseus’, after the vessel that produced the ancient paradox by the same name – could an object still be considered the same object if you replaced all of its parts with identical ones? – and set its course to collide with ‘Mondazzoli’, the corporate behemoth created by the merger of the two largest Italian publishers, Mondadori and Rizzoli.
