Giuseppe Pontiggia was an Italian writer, translator, and educator. After a first unnoticed short story anthology published in 1959, he decided to devote himself entirely to writing starting from 1961.
Background
Giuseppe Pontiggia was born on September 25, 1934, in Erba, Italy. His father, Ugo Pontiggia, was a banking official, and his mother was an actress. Pontiggia's childhood growing up outside of Como was quite tragedic. In 1943 his father was murdered amidst civil unrest. After the family moved to Milan in 1948, his sister committed suicide.
Education
Giuseppe Pontiggia earned a degree from the Catholic University of Milan with a thesis on the work of Italo Svevo in 1959.
Italian novelist Giuseppe Pontiggia stands out among his contemporaries for having followed his own distinctive literary style during a period dominated by Neorealism. Influenced by French writer René Daumal, Pontiggia has crafted novels that address existential questions and point out destructive human behavior. His interest in literature was shared by his brother Giampiero, who became a poet writing under the name Giampiero Neri. Also, Giuseppe Pontiggia taught Italian language and literature for twenty years and worked in a bank while attending college.
Having worked at a bank, Giuseppe Pontiggia used the experience as a basis for his first novel, which has initially collected with short stories as La morte in banca: Cinque racconti e un romanzo breve. The novel's eighteen-year-old protagonist Carrabba is dramatically changed by his time spent working in a bank, where he loses his optimistic outlook under the influence of his aggressive, hate-filled coworkers and the office's mechanized routine. Pontiggia repeatedly and sometimes explicitly presents Carrabba as an element in a chess game, an analogy he uses again in other works. This game ends with Carrabba's maturation or psychological death and rebirth. The story allows Pontiggia to develop themes, including the adverse, violent effects of industrialization and the importance of facing reality and accepting life as a mystery.
In L'arte della fuga Giuseppe Pontiggia experimented with a mostly plotless fictional account focusing on violent crime. This avant-garde work is heavy with symbolism and features two contrasting central characters, a dogmatic clerk and a writer of cultural criticism. Numerous murders and flights take place, with the clerk and writer interacting with many, often anonymous, figures.
One of Giuseppe Pontiggia's best-known works is Il giocatore invisible, in which he uses the psychological thriller format to show that ethics are an essential base for intellectual endeavors. The story begins with the central figure, a nameless college professor, criticized in a professional journal for his assertion that he can confirm the origins of the word "hypocrite." The professor sets out to find this anonymous writer, who shows a real hatred for him. In the process, he begins to look at his wife, his lover, and his colleagues in a new and often unflattering light. When he eventually uncovers the identity of the critic, it has little importance compared to his growing personal problems, which are fueled by his being deceived and deceiving. The novel's translation as The Invisible Player by Annapaola Cancogni was Pontiggia's United States debut. Reviews of this version stressed its intellectual qualities and sometimes presented it as hard to read.
An actual 1927 incident involving the escape of a political prisoner provided the basis for Giuseppe Pontiggia's novel Il raggio d'ombra. A doctor, without severe political interests, is persuaded to take in a fugitive named Losi, who, in the end, proves to be an informer assigned to help orchestrate the arrest of others. However, it is the doctor who will receive the worst punishment. A subsequent search for Losi ends in the cemetery where his grave locates. Thus, the pressing question of why he acted as he did remains unanswered.
Giuseppe Pontiggia's best-selling La grande sera is a consistently antirealistic novel about a man who abandons his family, friends, and career because he is tired of them. He leaves to create a new life, but the novel stays focused on the lives of the people left in his wake. The author uses yet another unconventional approach in Vite di uomini non illustri, a fictional encyclopedia of eighteen "non-illustrious" people. Parodying Plutarch's classical model of reviewing famous lives, it instead details the experiences of ordinary people. Their lives are often unhappy and marked by self-deception, with exceptional happiness appearing as a rare occurrence.
Giuseppe Pontiggia believed that the quest for truth sustains literature.
Quotations:
"Language is used to defend oneself, to attack, to deceive, and to deceive oneself, not to understand. Everything should be reinterpreted."
"We do nothing but pass from one decisive age to another, until a moment decides, this time definitively, of everything. In the meantime, we continue to make decisions."
Personality
Quotes from others about the person
Daniela Marcheschi: "He has shown the ability to reach a balance between fresh creativity and intellectual depth, between irony and emotion, humor and sadness, elegant prose and wealth of meanings. Pontiggia has given his readers a significant picture of Italian society in the twentieth century."
Interests
Writers
René Daumal
Connections
Giuseppe Pontiggia married Lucia Magnocavallo in 1963. They had a son, Andrea.