It's never too late to learn to live

A narrator who, at least initially, reveals little about himself. We know he's a forty-year-old writer who emigrated in search of work and lacks certainty. He's welcomed with apparent hospitality into his cousin Mauro's large villa in Enniskerry, County Wicklow, Ireland, and finds himself living with him, his wife Olivia, their five children, and their two housekeepers, Sara and Gema, in a dysfunctional family and an oppressive household, dictated by obsessive and maniacal rules.

Not even the outside world offers refuge: the protagonist observes places and people as if they were mirrors of his own inadequacy and tries unsuccessfully to find work in the bookshops of Dublin and Bray, eventually taking a job as a hotel cleaner. In this emotional exile, in an Ireland full of contradictions, the protagonist forms sudden friendships and subterranean solidarity with babysitters, experiences a fleeting romantic relationship, and discovers in writing the only possible form of resistance and his only true homeland.

The island, with its eternal rains and endless greenery, becomes the mirror of an identity crisis, simultaneously repelling and forcing an inward look, becoming complicit in a transformation. Irish exile thus becomes an internal laboratory made of the words and stories needed to finally find a home. A "house to build," that is—to use a German term dear to twentieth-century art and practice—a Bauhaus of one's own. And it is no coincidence that Gianfranco Di Fiore's novel that collects the events just outlined is precisely Bauhaus (readerforblind, 2026, €22.00, 576 pages).

We asked Gianfranco Di Fiore, a writer with a career spanning more than a decade, how much (if any) of the book is autobiographical:

It's the most difficult question for a writer, and it becomes even more so for Bauhaus. If I could simplify (out of modesty or fear), I might say 'everything and nothing,' and in part I think so; but I naturally tend to seek complexity, I try to redefine it, and so I think back to a cornerstone of twentieth-century philosophy, Gilles Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, a study of learning seen as a threshold between the unknowable and the knowable, a dialectic played out between the problem and its solution: on the one hand, the Idea (of living) and on the other, experience (to be lived). If I think of my novel Bauhaus as an idea of literature and of my life as the concrete experience that forms the backdrop to the novel, then, to borrow from Deleuze, for my book I can say that the difference is repetition: it's a story different from my life but at the same time a repetition of it, a faithful duplicate.

Does changing space, the place where we live, as the narrator does, help change what we have inside us?

I'd like to say yes, but I believe we are our places. What our native, familiar space imprints on our flesh and thoughts remains largely immutable. Proof of this is the centrality of my novels to the territory, the domestic environment, and even the objects that accompany us over time. Rather than changing over the course of our lives, we expand as Beings.

How does the book's protagonist experience uprooting, finding himself in an alien world?

Uprooting in Bauhaus is painful and insurmountable because it isn't suffered by the protagonist but happens by choice. Perhaps the illusion of being able to change or improve one's life in another place/space led him on what turned out (for me) to be a journey of bitter, illuminating desolation. It's easy to accept losing to fate, or bad luck, but not because of one's own choices. Perhaps it's because great narratives, which begin with epics and move through ancient poetry, as well as mythological tales, have often placed the theme of travel at the center of their meaning; we've inherited the sense of travel from a philosophical idea of virtue, of obligatory passage, but a plant, even if moved with its roots to another place, will end up not being the same, because everything around it will change: its nourishment, climate, colors, reactions.

Why can't the family that takes him in be a refuge, a safe haven?

"Family is never a haven, never a safe haven, even if thinking that it is all this reassures us. Family is the first extreme situation the world throws at us, to use Karl Jaspers's words. We truly become ourselves when we leave the family, no longer needing to feel safe by the will of others, by expectations that are not our own."

What does writing represent for you?

I was wrong; that's the hardest question for a writer. I've thought about it often over the years, and at a certain point I even stopped wanting to think about it. Finally, I realized that writing is nothing more than the manifestation of a limitation: my inability to fit in with the world, my inability not to get bored among people, my inability to achieve lasting serenity. The more I write, the more I limit myself; the more I tell, the more I simply express my inability to live. Writing thus becomes the (accessible) phenomenon of all my inability to Be.