“With his writing he envelops the reader like a python” – Corriere.it

“Many years ago I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that wants to be written in the same way that you fall in love with someone: the dream becomes irresistible, you can no longer do anything, and finally you give in.” and succumb even when your instincts tell you to run away because after all, it could be a dangerous game where someone is likely to get hurt. (The Shards, the incipit)




We’ve been waiting for it for 13 years and now it’s here: 742 highly inspired pages, an impressive return that will captivate and devour you. “The Splinters” also makes me nervous because of certain long panoramic digressions and certain redundant taxonomy. But then you get caught up in it and emerge overwhelmed by an unstoppable thriller mechanism that is drawn into the 80s, between hardcore sex, flaunted luxury, splatter drifts, cocaine and Quaaludes in rivers. A few months after its release, it is still in our circulation. And so we talk about it with the writer Giuseppe Culicchia, who, in addition to “The Shards,” has also translated four of Ellis’ other novels excellently.

How do you translate an Ellis novel? How long did it take you?


“It took six months. I did a first draft and then read it again. I translated it by reading it, I didn’t want to ruin the surprise.”

I read it while listening to the music mentioned: Ultravox, Split Enz, Icehouse. The music of our youth and other music we’ve never heard before. An incredible playlist.
“I translated it that way too, each time looking for the songs he quoted. Even though he mostly listened to new wave while I was more into punk.”

His writing is magic. How does he manage to hypnotize the reader in this way? And how did you keep the pace?
“Respect punctuation. It’s something that’s very close to my heart: you have to be strict. Punctuation is rhythm, musicality. His writing is hyperrealistic.

Full of details.
“Ellis writes books that are catalogs. It is his strength. Like David Hockney, whom he quotes about the swimming pools: You seem to be looking at one of his paintings where the details are very clear. Even the descriptions of the crimes. Some images never leave me.

“I remembered what Robert Mallory had said as we stood in front of the Gap at the Galleria store in Sherman Oaks the next week: ‘When you’re talking to me, dude, you’re really talking to yourself.’ It sounded like some dark, hippie nonsense that Charles Manson might have said, and I shuddered to think that Robert had said that to me.

And then the dialogues.

«It’s his trademark. One of the most difficult things to portray in a novel is dialogue. His are always believable. You seem to hear the characters’ voices.”

Sometimes all this precision, this obsessive accumulation of details, is tiring and boring. Both Melissa Broder wrote it in the New York Times and Sam Byers wrote it in the Guardian. One wonders if the length of the sentences and the book isn’t a mistake if more editing work wasn’t needed. Or it’s the opposite. Perhaps certain panoramic descriptions are part of the mechanism of psychedelic writing.

“It’s just his style. Also in Glamorama a American psycho There were very long descriptions, the clothes, the brands, the streets. One of his role models, I don’t know if I know him, is Moby Dick. It’s a way to envelop you in his world like a python. For long sentences, you just need to know how to write them. Think of Thomas Bernhard.”

In his own little way, even towards Marcel Proust.

“That’s it. In Less than Zero, Ellis used much shorter sentences. Think about the beginning. Then in the following books he changed his style a little.

“People are afraid of getting caught in freeway traffic in Los Angeles. It’s the first thing I hear when I come back to town. Blair picks me up at the airport and I hear her mutter that sentence as she walks up the entrance ramp. (Incipit of «Meno di Zero», translation by Marisa Caramella)


His vocabulary is simple, he never wants to surprise the reader with complex constructions or words that are too difficult.
“It is in keeping with the tradition of 20th century American literature, beginning with Hemingway.” Even Raymond Carver.

Ellis says he was inspired by Joan Didion’s style, which had a cold and clear prose, a frozen minimalism barely warmed by the California sun.
“It’s true, he always loved Didion and books like him white album».

“I wanted to be like Susan Reynolds. And I also wanted to write like this: insensitivity as a feeling, insensitivity as a motive, insensitivity as a reason for existence, insensitivity as ecstasy.” (Splitter)


Some consider his books, even the most recent, to be empty, superficial and full of aesthetic nihilism.
“Ellis was often not understood. This is what happened to Jonathan Swift when he wrote that eating children was enough to solve the problem of hunger. However, it was the 18th century. A few hundred years have passed in vain.

Ellis’ books are really about the commercialization of personality, feelings and life. They are novels that are so superficial that they are actually very profound.
“American Psycho was a cruel satire of capitalism, of a world without values. The sensational thing is that when it appeared and afterward, not only angry feminists and improvised critics, but also people of a certain intellectual stature considered it a hymn to Patrick Bateman, to cynicism, to crime, even though it was very harsh criticism of the system . It is no coincidence that Bateman’s idol was Donald Trump, who was just a tycoon at the time.

Ellis never holds back his pen, has the ability to tell even the most unpleasant truths and has an anti-sentimental style. He doesn’t care about political correctness.
“Thank God, he is a free person. And then how do you write politically correctly? When you have someone like Bateman, how do you do it? An author should not judge his characters. Unfortunately, many authors censor themselves. We live in a time reminiscent of the Salem witch hunts staged by Arthur Miller in “The Crucible.” A climate that is, on the one hand, ridiculous and, on the other, frightening. A colleague told me that she was translating a novel by a writer with a racist character and the author did not use the word “nigger” so as not to offend readers, but used “n” with an ellipsis. How do you do it? If someone is racist, they say nigger, not n…”.

He also didn’t hold back when it came to sex and homosexuality in “Schegge”.

“He explained well that he could not explain his homosexuality at the time and that the relationships only took place in secret.”

It has been noted that the gay world is not doing particularly well in this regard. Ellis claimed the right to speak freely about it.
“Of course. Homosexuality is neutral from this point of view. Even Ernst Röhm, the head of the NS-SA, was homosexual.

Sex is omnipresent in “Schegge” and the homosexual scenes are repeated in great detail. Isn’t that a little provocative and isn’t it a provocation that’s a little out of time?
“But no, his gender, like his writing, is hyperrealistic. The question with sex in novels is whether it is necessary or not. In this case it is and it doesn’t seem to me to be any more disturbing, any more than certain afternoon programs. As for provocation, perhaps there is more need for it now. In the 70s and 80s the fanatics came from the right, just think of the ban on Tondelli’s “Altri libertini” in 1980. Today it comes from the left, from those who describe themselves as tolerant. A world on the contrary, to quote Vannacci.

“A seventeen-year-old driving around Mullholland in a Mercedes convertible, wearing a private school uniform and a pair of Wayfarer shoes, is an image from a certain period of the Empire that I was conscious of at times – did I look like an idiot?” I wondered briefly – before saying to myself, “I look so cool, I don’t care.”

Is “Schegge” a memoir? Is what he says true or false? It seems like the story of an autobiography, but at a certain point you start to doubt the credibility of the narrator.

“It’s his style, Ellis has always played with ambiguity. If you read again Glamorama e American psychoYou ask yourself a lot of questions. There is a part of it Moon Park This is an autobiography, it tells everything that is true and then at a certain point there is a marriage to a Hollywood actress that never happened. As for splinters, Ellis
He definitely went to Buckley and lived in Los Angeles after Charles Manson. The figure of the serial killer appeared again and again during these years. Sharon Tate’s murder dates back to 1969. There were a lot of trawlers.”

By the way, why did you translate “the trawler” as “trawler”? Were there other options? Did you have any doubts?

“No, it was right. The serial killer in question uses fish in unpleasant and bizarre ways on several occasions. And so he catches the victims, spreads a net and brings them to land.

Before Ellis released it, he did a podcast about it during Covid. Now Luca Guadagnino will direct an HBO series based on “Schegge”. With all the “cliffhangers,” the pauses in tense moments, the suspense, and the twists, it seems perfect for a series.

“Probably yes, although I don’t know much about it. I’ve only seen one in a series, Fargoand unlike the movie, I didn’t like it at all.

Her latest novel is The Little Girl Who Shouldn’t Cry, Mondadori. Do you take inspiration from Ellis when you write?
“I discovered it during the first translations for Tullio Pironti by Francesco Durante, which I always regret as a person and as an author.” I have always loved it and when Einaudi asked me to translate it for myself it was a great emotion. Let’s assume that Marisa Caramella, who asked me at the time, might have seen something in my writings that was close to Ellis’s.”