The Toy Catalogue     by Sandra Petrignani, Translated by Ray Lombardo Original title: Il catalogo dei giocattoli Original language: Italian Published by Boulevard Pub. Date: 1990 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 128 pages ISBN: 0946889236 List Price: £5.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide

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Born in 1952, Sandra Petrignani is one of Italy’s ‘giovani scrittori’ or young writers of the 1980s and 1990s, many of whom were originally promoted by Rome’s adventurous Theoria publishing house and now write for the Milanese literary magazine Panta. They were perhaps the first post-war generation to escape the shadow of literary giants such as Alberto Moravia and Cesare Pavese. Petrignani’s book The Toy Catalogue reads partly as a mock-encyclopaedic study of toys and games and partly as a memoir of childhood; it also hints at the overspill of childhood sensations into the lives of adults, their sexuality and style of behaviour, thus serving as psychological self-exploration. She was interviewed for Babel Guides in London in 1990.

Interview

BABEL: I remember looking for the first time at the contents page of The Toy Catalogue. In one hundred and thirty pages there are sixty-five chapters: Balloons, Building Blocks, The Unknockdownable Man and so on. Then my eye picked out View Master and reading that chapter I had a clear mental snapshot of that clunky brown thing with the picture wheels — I was tugged into the forgotten past of childhood with its sharp focus and vivid colours. How did you manage to get that evocative charge in your book?


PETRIGNANI: With Proust’s method of ‘involuntary memory’, the famous madeleine....I gathered up and played around with toys. I spread them over my desk, I had little wooden horses, a rag doll, toy cars and so on. I’d go and borrow my son Guido’s toys, he was about five then, and he’d angrily come looking for them. Then I remember getting some of those big old glass marbles they don’t make anymore, so today’s children don’t play with them, but Guido knew of course they were toys so he was convinced they were his property. There was a big tussle over that. Also friends brought me toys, things like wooden animals in an old-fashioned style and still being made up in the mountains.


BABEL: L’Europeo magazine called the book ‘an extraordinary achievement of memory’ that ‘restores to us the magical territory of play.’ And everyone I know who’s read it here has referred to this depth of memory.


PETRIGNANI: Something that happened with The Toy Catalogue was that although I thought I’d had an unhappy childhood, after writing the book I realised it wasn’t true. I got back to the nice parts of being a child. I realised it’s terribly easy to lay a sadness that comes later over those years. When you touch the involuntary memories then all those pleasurable experiences return.

‘Here’s a word (Il Carillon or Music Box) that makes no mystery about what it means, the very sound of it is music. The ballerina with the white tutu awakes from her imprisonment inside the lacquered box. She dances on red velvet before the mirror set into the lid. The waltz is over, she comes to a halt. With her arm so gracefully arched, she waits at the ready, not knowing whether she should dance on or go back to sleep. Hair black as ebony, lips red as blood, her prince is the hand that turns the key to wind the mechanism. Merely opening the box isn’t enough, the ballerina gets to her feet but just stands there, paralysed by the silence. Only the music can give her life. The melody drives her around and around in an infinite pirouette. A little click every three turns and she changes direction. Her loneliness is devastating.’ p57 The Music Box