In Italy, Mr. Monda is best known for his weekly column (on books and authors) in La Repubblica, the distinguished daily newspaper. And he has turned to writing fiction. His first novel, “Assoluzione” (“Absolution”), was a best seller there. A third, set in New York City in 1962, the year of Mr. Monda’s birth, will be published in March. All this activity, combined with his glittering friendships, has aroused some skepticism in Italy, where he has been called “the national champion of cultural networking,” not necessarily a term of praise in a country where cultural entrepreneurship is seen by some to violate Old World traditions established by class rank and inherited social standing. Not that Mr. Monda is an upstart. On the contrary. His father, Dante, was a prosperous lawyer who was also the mayor of a small city an hour outside Rome and, as a hobby, helped finance films. “I remember when I was 10, 11, all these filmmakers at our home, and I was totally fascinated,” Mr. Monda said. In 1977, his father died of a stroke, at age 45. Antonio, 15 at the time, sank into despair. “I was desperate,” he said. He found solace in movie theaters. “I saved my life watching great American films in the ’70s,” he said. “This was the time of the great Hollywood renaissance: Coppola, Scorsese, Kubrick, Peckinpah, Woody Allen.” Each was an auteur with a private vision who yet reached and stirred a broad public. This ideal informs all Mr. Monda’s own creations, from the dialogues he moderates at the Morgan — in which two cultural figures (in May it was the performance artist Marina Abramovic and the architect Daniel Libeskind) discuss their favorite films — to his after-parties, where students and journalists mingle with Oscar and Pulitzer winners. The private-public formula is easier to imagine than to execute, as Mr. Monda knows from bruising experience. He wrote and directed an autobiographical feature, “Dicembre,” which won plaudits at festivals, including the Venice Film Festival in 1991, “but was a total disaster at the box office,” he recalled, laughing. By this time, he was already set on a different course, guided by his growing infatuation with New York. On his first visit, in October 1979, he was dazzled by the dusky light of the “magic hours” and by the cabdriver who told him, “Welcome to the heart of the world.” It is the same enchantment felt by so many immigrants and émigrés who later shaped the city’s cultural life. A synoptic history of modern New York could be told through the contributions of expatriates: W. H. Auden reinventing Anglo-American poetry while he sat “in one of the dives on Fifty-second Street,” Hannah Arendt distilling “the origins of totalitarianism,” Tina Brown and Graydon Carter unearthing hidden sources of power and glamour in the feature journalism they revived in the 1980s and ’90s. Like them all, Mr. Monda connected with New York viscerally, though his particular affinity was for the city’s Jewish-American experience. It might seem curious, since Mr. Monda is a practicing Catholic, educated by Jesuits. Today he still seems surprised by the attraction. “All of a sudden I discovered everything I like — music-wise, novel-wise — is either written, composed, or directed by a Jew,” he said. He immersed himself in the writing of Singer (“my hero”), Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer and Mr. Roth, as well as in Mr. Allen’s films, in Arthur Miller’s plays and in George Gershwin and Bob Dylan. Next, he had an idea, to make a documentary for Italian audiences on Jewish-American authors. He interviewed as many of them as he could and in each case began with a blunt question: “Why do I like you?”
Posted on: Sun, 22 Sep 2013 12:56:17 +0000
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