He is truly a great writer, Antonio Franchinias this courageous book demonstrates, The fire you carry inside you (Marsilio, 2024), in which he confesses his difficult relationship with his mother Angela, through a strong narrative, interspersed with reflections. There are considerations on family relationships, on our country, on Naples, where the writer spent his childhood and early youth, on Milan, where he works and where his now elderly mother moved after her widowhood.
Angela is a woman with an unbearable, unpredictable, violent character, spiteful against everything and everyone, capable of uncontainable fury, of insults to her own children, of a pessimistic, racist vision of the world, full of the most obvious clichés that show narrowness in conception of the world of which it is part.
Without friends or lasting relationships, the little girl born in the province of Benevento, the homeland of witches, moved as a child to Naples, the city of the mysterious and overflowing volcanic energy with which she herself appears endowed.
Despite having studied, graduated from classical high school and then university student, with an exuberant physique, with the typical features of southern women, she married a much older man, coming from a higher social class than hers, and with whom she had three children: in addition to narrator Antonio, two sisters who will suffer the bullying, the malice, the insults of a mother whose nefarious influence they cannot escape.
It is worth quoting the incipit of this book-memoir with a strong emotional impact on readers:
Although she is considered a beautiful woman by many, my mother stinks. Among us we talk about it without allusions… ..the human body stinks and this is demonstrated by the nursery rhymes that my grandmother, her mother, teaches us…
Here appears the most interesting and engaging part of this book, the constant presence of the Neapolitan language, a dialect, which certainly manifests the millenary cultural and linguistic dignity of the Southern Kingdom.
Angela, who prefers to be called by her second name “Carmela Candida”, expresses what her writer son recognizes as disvalues, a reverse education that she has imparted to him, all imbued with distrust, disesteem, ill will, towards everything and everyone. In her long novel we find all the phases of the growth of the family at the center of which she always remains, her asymmetrical marital relationship, the pure hatred for her husband’s sister Anna, for the neighbors, for the friends of her children ; she enters straight into the life of her youngest daughter who allows herself to be devastated, invaded and destroyed. The more than colorful, heavy, insulting expressions that come out of Angela’s mouth are terrible and spare no one: neither her children, nor their friends, nor relatives near or far, nor other ethnic groups, Calabrian, Sicilian, “Sardinians”: he speaks of everyone with contempt, expressing the frustration of those who perhaps thought they deserved more from a life that will ultimately prove mediocre.
When she is now a widow, she will have to move to Milan where she will live next to her son ” ‘or writer”, of which she never admits to being proud, will unleash against the North, as opposed to a mythical South, all the insults of which her Neapolitan lexicon full of Edwardian quotes, Christmas in the Cupiello house cited on every occasion, is capable. The typical foods of Campania, “’and millignane”, in Milan they are full of water, because Milan is a muddy city, while Naples lives on lava rock richer in nutrients.
Other notable characters also appear in the book: the narrator’s father, who after lunch puts on his dressing gown and pajamas for a siesta, and then returns to study until nine in the evening immersed in his papers and beloved books; Uncle Francesco, now Milanese, the golden Cartier on the arm of the armchair, who has never abandoned his roots and southern culture, who welcomes his nephew Antonio who emigrated from Naples and from his mother’s clutches, imparting his philosophy to him.
Finally, all the supporting actors who move around the gigantic figure of Angela, daughters, brothers-in-law, carers, doormen, pizza chefs, nurses, doctors, Italians and foreigners, all forced to deal with this over-the-top personality, at times nice even if cause of desperation for the children who took it upon themselves until their death.
At the end of the book, Antonio Franchini writes:
For me it was a liberating piece of writing, I didn’t look for any posthumous showdown: it’s not fair to fight with the dead, you fight against the living, and when we were alive we fought for a long time…..But I did one thing, I invited readers to meet her, as I did with the friends I invited to dinner to let them live an extreme experience.
Here is “extreme”, the adjective that best suits this woman who expressed the worst and the best of a certain southern character, the fire of passion, the sense of superiority of those who come from the Samnite people, who they made bend the head to the Romans, to the Caudine Forks, and who were able to tell much about the national character through a language – with expressions that are untranslatable due to their effectiveness.
