Karen Pinkus

TRUE CRIME, AUTOFICTION, TRANSLATION: A FEW NOTES ON MY FORTHCOMING NOVEL

I first wrote Nuda proprietà in English. I started out with the opening lines, about the signing of a contract. In Italy, you can buy a casa (in Italian, this is a general term, even if/when you are talking about an apartment) from an elderly person who will continue to enjoy the rights of occupancy until they pass on to the next realm. With all due respect, you’d probably prefer the former owner to be in poor health. If she were to overstay her welcome in this realm, you might need to think about creative solutions…

I worked for several years. At some point it would have been a more traditional detective story, with a resolution. But I kept finding myself pulled in different directions. I was extremely fortunate to get the novel into the hands of an agent. He called it a “jewel,” but he said he would have trouble selling it in the current market because I am not Italian. (Question: Does the tyranny of autofiction as a selling point [for literary, non-commercial fiction] reign equally over male authors?). I rewrote the novel with an Italian American protagonist. She ends up moving to Rome and this new version allowed me to keep some of what I liked best about the narrative intact, but I could at least explore the perspective of an outsider. The agent said my revisions would resolve the problem of authorial identity but that the book was “quiet” and the world is “noisy” so he passed, although he did say he might be able to sell it as a translation. Another agent told me she found the characters too distant (from the reader). (Are male authors allowed to write, in the third person, about characters that do not confess their feelings?)

I rewrote Nuda proprietà, in Italian. Some elements of the first version remain, but of course, it’s an entirely different text and my Italian editor says that for him, it’s not a detective story at all. I am truly and overwhelmingly flattered that he compares it, not to one of the many Italian gialli authors that I love dearly, but rather, to Dino Buzzati’s The Desert of the Tartars.

 I considered publishing it under a pseudonym suggested by my partner. I won’t reveal it in case I ever want to use it in the future.

I am now working on a translation of the novel into English. What to do with the title? The term has a particular meaning in Italian and although the closest thing might be a reverse mortgage (hawked by right-wing B celebrities on television), it’s far from exact. Both nuda and proprietà resonate with English cognates. Maybe it’s okay to leave them as is.