Everyone has to face their own survival curve

Each of us feels at certain moments in life that we need protection, care. He feels that his emotions need recognition. Each of us may need compassion or to be helped, or rather saved. Life, in fact, always presents you with new challenges, often sudden and not easy to manage.

In Carlo Patriarca's latest novel " The Survival Curve " (Neri Pozza, 2024, pp. 192, also e-book) Vittorio, a retired history professor and hypochondriac of Vittorio, after many misplaced fears, one day finds himself facing a truly worrying diagnosis, in addition to pushing him back into reality, it reconnects the threads of the lives of two young doctors, his nephew Aldo and his lifelong friend. Bruno, with a reserved and thoughtful nature, has become an anatomopathologist, a profession that leads him to deal alone with insidious diseases, often disguised behind false appearances, as is the case with Vittorio's illness, a charismatic surgeon since robust self-control, after so many successes he unexpectedly finds himself living with the bitter taste of error, obsessed by betrayed perfectionism.

The events of the two friends unfold over thirty years of loves, regrets, memories, guilt, deceptions, ambitions and burning envies, up to the shadow line of maturity. Because for them, but probably for all of us, life is a daily struggle with a complexity from which we are never allowed to look away.

We ask Carlo Patriarca, a writer and pathologist like Bruno, one of his protagonists, first of all what the survival curve that gives the novel its title is:

«The survival curve alluded to in the title recalls the curves that populate medical articles with their Cartesian graphs. But I was interested in contrasting these collective curves, afflicted by the intrinsic emotional weakness of statistics, with the individual curves of the private lives of doctors and patients. The curve I wanted to tell is the one that we imprint on our lives to overcome difficulties but which exposes us to danger, like the curve of a hairpin bend on a mountain road climbed by bicycle."

Bruno is an anatomopathologist like you. How much of Bruno is there in her and how much is autobiographical in the novel?

«The job we do ends up shaping our character at least in part and Bruno and I do the same job. But Bruno is very defeatist and introverted, I would like not to find myself too much in him."

Why did you put the phrase from Bergman's Strawberry Place at the beginning of the novel "The doctor's first duty is to ask for forgiveness"?

"Don't take mine for poor cunning, but the answer is really in the book for those who know how to find it, it's in almost every chapter."

You wrote mainly historical novels. How did you arrive at the most intimate and contemporary novel?

«This text was written about fifteen years ago, and the chapters that compose it were born as stories linked together by the recurrence of the same characters in different situations. In writing them I responded to a narrative impulse (which in some chapters became ethical) by actually speaking about things that were only apparently closer to me than those of the books published later. Then the text remained on my computer and over the years I only made a few timid attempts to publish it, but I myself was not convinced. I recently took it up again, modifying it a little, and I said to myself that I would like to leave a testimony that at least in part concerns my profession as an anatomopathologist, which does not consist - as many believe - in carrying out autopsies, but in diagnosing diseases, often cancerous and sometimes fatal. So, through my agent, I decided to submit it to the publisher."

What links the profession of doctor to that of writer?

«There are illustrious examples of medical writers, far too many and too high to list, in Europe as well as in Russia and America, at least. Many of them did not write about illnesses at all, as Virginia Woolf would have liked when she wrote: 'Given how common illness is, [...] it seems strange indeed that illness does not figure together with love, battles and jealousy among main themes of literature. One would believe that entire novels were devoted to influence; epic poems to typhoid fever; odes to pneumonia; lyrics about toothache. Hand; with a few exceptions [...] literature does its best so that its field of investigation remains the mind; so that the body remains a sheet of smooth glass through which the soul appears pure and clear'. However, in the writing of medical writers, in their characters, you always sense the presence of bodies that act, whether it is the momentum of young organisms, the misadventures and resentful outbursts caused by nerves and the belly, or the weight and slowness of old people. afflicted by poor digestion and chronic insomnia. And this also happens in all the great literature of non-medical authors, for which the body is never a sheet of smooth glass. Even Simenon admitted it, invited to speak at a medical conference: 'The truth is that we and you, novelists and doctors, look at man from the same perspective'."