Snapshots, 4 documentary tales by Alessia Marinoni
For two weeks, starting from the 17th of November, we will post four short stories – coming out respectively on Tuesday and on Thursday – taken from the collection of short stories Istantanee – Snapshots, written by Alessia Marinoni. They will be available both in their original version in Italian and in the translated version in English. An introduction by the autor follows.
The concept of this project – Snaphots – comes from the idea of creating a series of non-fiction articles that were to include four apparently different stories which could actually be read finding an unexpected central idea: their protagonists are constantly looking for something they think they’re missing in their everyday life but they all notice that they can get a satisfactory result only when they willingly adjust their expectations to the reality. In that moment, every one of them succeeds in finding what they had really been lacking for a long time. One was looking for love but, instead, he found a little bit of calm in self-forgiveness. Another one was trying desperately to grow up fast but found out that she was to find the answers she was looking for only through patience. The third protagonist, on the other hand, was trying to find a job to fill his life up but he later realized that his life was already full. Finally, the last one, was only looking for a cinema to escape reality and, instead, he found a friend in a place that seemed so hostile to him.
The protagonists of Snapshots are real people (even though their names are fictitious) from whose stories I drew a little slice of life which was directly told to me by them or which I jealously stored in my memory.
I am sure that the same narrative thread I tried to keep constant in my four short stories will also be present in some of our readers’ lives, whether it’s clearly visible or hiding. That thread is linking the experiences of the people who are reading these short stories and that of the one writing them. With the aim of trying to find these correspondences and making these stories as accessible as possible, I translated them into English.
Alessia Marinoni
My name is Alessia, I was born on a summer morning twenty-five years ago in a little town near Milan and I’m a linguistic mediation student. A few years ago, the city of Bologna became my second home because that’s where I’ve been studying. Living away from home gave me the opportunity to make new experiences such as sharing a house with five other students my age and dedicating myself to the activities I love: writing and translating. I like to listen to what other people want to share and I like pondering all the different little details of words which change according to the context in which they’re used, even on a cultural level. That’s why, in the near future, I would like to mix my listening skills with my translation and writing skills as much as possible in order to make it my job.