Renata Adler

Renata Adler fotografata da Avedon

Renata Adler è una brava scrittrice, da noi poco cosciuta (mi risultla che solo il suo romanzo Speedboat, Fuoribordo, sia stato tradotto in italiano, nel 1983, da Giancarlo Buzzi per Guanda). Tra l'altro è nata a Milano, nel 1938, da genitori tedeschi in fuga dal nazismo. E' poi approdata in America. Ora i suoi romanzi - scritti negli anni '70 - sono riproposti da Nyrb Classics. "What is amazing about Adler’s novels is the way that they integrate cultural analysis with telling details of social nuance. Speedboat, like Pitch Dark, has just been republished by NYRB Classics, after years of being passed along to new readers like samizdat pamphlets. Both novels have more in common with the New Novel than with the thrillers that Adler has said she loves. Both are written in a “discontinuous first-person” (in Muriel Spark’s phrase) that cumulatively conveys what it is like to be a female intellectual in the world of publishing in the nineteen-seventies. These are not works of realism—they have a dreamlike quality— but they contain as much reality as a Balzac novel does. It’s just that their reality is incantatory, sparse, periodically blazing, and not a little self-consciously neurotic". Meghan O'Rourke, newyorker.