APCOM

"Literature is a medicine. I think that for many young people it's easy to feel alone and isolated from the world, and reading is a way to find company, even if one doesn't have real friends. The characters make us feel less lonely, and reading is an energizer for solitude. Peter Cameron, 48 American writer, explains his point of view on literature and extends the beneficial function also to who writes: It helps me to understand myself. There is something innocent in writing, it makes me feel better in my life. All my art has to do with feeling better with myself, with creating experiences through the artistic invention".

Author of novels and tales - in Italy Adelphi published "The City of Your Final Destination", "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful to You", and a collection of short-stories, "Fear of mathematics" - Cameron was in Milano to take part in the cultural festival 'La Milanesiana'. Laughing but actually shy, the writer described in an admirable way the worries and difficulties of adolescents and in particular those of 17 year old James, unforgettable protagonist of "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You". "Adolescence, he told us, is a crucial period in the formation of people, in which one begins to become himself." A key passage which the writer transforms in art. "The novel, Cameron added, is a good way of exploring the formation procedures. In my stories in which I talk about adults changes are more vanished, in adolescence instead there is a more violent and more suffered tension". However, when we ask him if even him, like Garcia Marquez, believes that all the most important things happen before 20 years of age, the answer is negative: "I do not think that it's like this, not everything happens in that limit".

Like it often happens with important literature, Cameron's novels evoke more situations in which the reader easily identifies with the characters and in some way even with the same novelist: "It's something that makes me happy, the writer said, because it allows me to be in contact with many people, it makes me feel less lonely. It's a great gift that the readers make to the author". It's a gift that is born also from the fact that, according to Cameron, books have their own life and, and once the novel is completed, it separates from its author. "On one hand this pleases me, but on the other it frustrates me, because one has worked a lot and put a lot in a book. But I like that the books go around the world alone and that maybe even in a 100 years someone might still find them somewhere".

James' story in "Someday This Pain Will Be Useful To You" is also that of a difficulty in translating thoughts, which are very clear in the boy's mind, into words, which struggle to come out. A story of fear in abandoning one's own small world codified in order to adventure in the mystery of the relations with other people. "There is an interesting separation, Cameron explained, between the language of thought and that of words, and it's exactly about this that I investigate in my book." And talking about James, and of how characters live beyond the written page, the novelist allows himself a little confession: "I hope that becoming older James finds a way to express himself and to communicate. The novel talks about how one can become a better person, a person able to see things in a different way and be at ease with oneself". This was also the reason that Cameron indicated as a motivation for reading and writing, this is how you compose the magnificent game of mirrors and literature": not only a contact between the author and his public, but also a kaleidoscope including characters enter too, which maybe in the end is the real essence of literature. (Leonardo Merlini)