Ilaria Bernardini chooses her language with care
Ilaria Bernardini has written eight novels in her native Italian, but only English would do for ‘The Portrait'
Ilaria Bernardini has written eight novels in her native Italian, but she had something different in mind for her first novel in English.
“I wanted it to feel like a thriller, keeping the revelations coming at a certain pace, giving the reader just enough so you’d immediately be drawn to the next chapter,” says the author of “The Portrait,” published this month by Pegasus.
Bernardini says the novels she’s written in her native tongue “have a dryness,” so it’s ironic that her English language debut displays such a full palette of feeling.
In the novel, Valeria Costas is a hugely successful author whose married lover of many decades, Martin, is in a coma after a major stroke. Desperate to be near him, Valeria creates a ruse, persuading Martin’s wife, Isla, an artist in her own right, to paint her portrait for the cover of her next book. These two women develop their own relationship, but with this enormous secret simmering just barely beneath the surface.
This poignant and powerful story is indeed a pageturner while also a meditation on writing and on the stories we create to build our identities and shape our lives.
Bernardini, who splits her time between Milan and London (where the book is set), spoke by Zoom about her portrait of Valeria and why she told it in English. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
QWhy did you write this particular book in English?
AIt just arrived in my mind in English. I didn’t actually want to do it in English. I wasn’t sure if I could — if I’d have a voice in English — but when I
tried it in Italian it didn’t work. I was hearing these two ladies speaking in English. Valeria is Greek and lives in France, and Isla is American, so they both speak it slightly differently; it’s a common language but there are also things lost in translation and you have to wonder if the other person understands you.
Also, there’s something
about characters crying or saying “I love you” in Italian that feels immediately melodramatic. For me, that comes with a lot of baggage, and the characters would have been less able to open up in Italian.
QWas it strange for you, normally a fast writer, to have to slow down to write in English?
AAs a writer working in another language, it helped me philosophically, the sense of being a bit lost, the otherness.
At the beginning, this pace was very claustrophobic — I was looking for the words, the nuances. But in Italian, I might have relied on cliches and the things I know I can do but that bore me now. This was a longer journey, but going slower allowed me to be in the depths of the thoughts. The novel has so many layers and I really could think all of it through.
Q
Did you have a clear sense of both Valeria and Isla from the start?
A
Usually, I have an idea and I try to make it work but in this case, the two of them just appeared, weirdly. It was very spiritual; I had them immediately and I just had to download whatever they were saying. I would just go back to the house and open that door and something was happening. It was spooky.
Q
The book is about storytelling, what we tell ourselves about our own lives and how we present them to the world, and all the half-truths, lies and faulty perceptions ingrained in those tales. Was that idea always there or did it evolve with these characters?
A
It was there from the beginning, even though it took edits and edits to make it more effective. I wanted to get to the question of what is our truth, about who is telling the story. You always think you’re in charge. Valeria thinks that but eventually she sees that Isla and her mother are telling their own stories.
We fight for our own narrative every single day. We keep pitching our own story. But maybe the best we can do is to let go of the obsession of controlling the narrative.