QFWFQ review: Calvino novel reborn as fierce political one-person show
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- Gregory Nussen adapted Italo Calvino's 1979 novel into a one-person show called QFWFQ, directed by Hannah Pilkes and running at Summerhall, Edinburgh until 31 August.
- QFWFQ draws on the narrative freedom of improvisation, with Nussen citing Keith Jarrett's free-associating rehearsal piano on The Köln Concert and an overheard keyboard workout in a Helsinki church as touchstones.
- Nussen frames their teenage summer-camp trip to Israel via Auschwitz — part of their American Jewish upbringing — as a form of coercion that promotes 'perpetual threat and victimhood' alongside Holocaust remembrance.
- The show rails against dominant narratives that, in Nussen's telling, have no place for them as a queer artist nor for the 700,000 Palestinians displaced in the foundation of Israel.
- Nussen deploys Calvino's 'unreliable narrator' conceit to call those narrators to account when stories about Israel and Palestine lack empathy and openness.
- The original 1979 novel was a head-spinning metafiction about a reader trying to make sense of disconnected manuscripts — a structure Nussen preserves through interrupted tales attributed to obscure European writers.
Why it matters: Edinburgh Fringe programmers have programmed a show that uses Calvino's avant-garde structure to argue that standard American Jewish Holocaust education doubles as political indoctrication, and that those framing Palestinians as absent from the story are themselves the 'unreliable narrators' being put on trial.
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