ABSTRACT
dear edo, as soon as you left I called luciana to ask for an explanation. but i got emotional and i just quickly said hello. i called her again today. she was very knowledgeable about the pro mondadori law and the conflict of interests between politics and information that assails literature. even she was amazed by how many writers for mondadori, all leftists and all visceral anti-berlusconi italians, say that mondadori is punctual with its payments, more so than other smaller and more virtuous publishing houses. they say it’s not important who publishes a writer, but what the writer writes. and that the question of conscience for a writer is secondary. and then they casually quote pound and céline. even the director of the newspaper la repubblica was saying ‘einaudi isn’t berlusconized, i will continue to publish there’. each person answers to his own conscience, i know. and conscience is fickle. but this widespread flattery, i must confess, makes me sad. and it was nice to hear luciana tell me that while you were in bologna, a few days before you left, when you met nanni you were upset when you found out that his latest book of poetry would be published by mondadori, especially since you and eco were about to release the first edition of alfabeta 2. and i was even more pleased to hear luciana add, ‘as soon as edoardo heard that einaudi was bought by mondadori, he left it, he blew off his contract and got back to work.’ yes, i am writing to tell you that it made me very happy to hear luciana in fine form and because now it seems that I’m in fine form too. my wife is doing great, too. and my daughter gioia sofia is a five year-old prodigy, really chatty.
