How the stuff of life is transformed into literature: This was the title of the interview with Antonio Franchini that Laura Lepri, way back in 1997, had included in the volume Creative writing. Creative writing told by the writers who teach it (Panta’s notebooks, Bompiani, pp. 56-71). In answering the question implicit in the title, he stated: «The writer lives from his memory, he lives in parallel with chronological time, and he works in parallel, so he recovers and digs up episodes from the past which made no sense when he experienced them, but which then acquire an emblematic, symbolic value. Literature is always a matter of symbols, and a writer must be able to write a story in which others can also recognize themselves.» (p.65).
Franchini and his fire
In his new novel, The fire you carry inside you, just published by Marsilio, forcefully emerges not only a past full of episodes and characters, a world populated by women, men and children with exuberant personalities, but above all, and above all, a titanic, intrusive and overflowing figure: his mother . A mother who had already been evoked in the story When will you kill yourself, master?which also gives its title to the collection of short stories also published by Marsilio in 1997 and then published again in 2019. A mother who, with her impossible character, had somehow “trained” her son to face life, its challenges , its difficulties, the inevitable pains, frustrations and hardships that each of us encounters on our path.
Angela and her character
In the new novel, this woman called Angela becomes the absolute protagonist of a world made up of family members, neighbors, schoolmates, “friends” and enemies, people about whom she has very firm and unshakable opinions and to whom she does not spare her salacious, withering and ferocious jokes expressed in a very colorful Neapolitan.
«Although she is considered a beautiful woman by many, my mother stinks. Between us we talk about it without allusions. “She seems to be near the dog’s cave” says my father as he comes out of the bedroom at the end of their afternoon rest. It refers to an underground passage in the solfatara of Pozzuoli, where the miasmas of carbon dioxide stagnate below a meter in height, leaving the human being unharmed but suffocating the dog who unwarily ventures into that passage.»
A fiery beginning
This is the dazzling incipit that seems to respond, like the rest of the book, to the imperative that stands out these days in the training proposal of the Belleville Writing School, a workshop entitled: Write as if everyone you know is dead. No discounts therefore, no sugarcoating, and not even pity, as well as no concession to self-censorship.
The narrator, in describing the existence, nature, character of this woman and at the same time the social and human context in which she lived, seems to ask herself what determined her way of being and conceiving her being in the world. In narrating tragic and comical episodes at the same time, the author questions himself on what seems to him to be the almost symbolic incarnation of all the worst defects of Italians: «qualinquism, racism, selfishness, opportunism, transformism, half-culture worse than ignorance, resentment.”
Franchini analyzes the mother-son relationship
Because it is not easy to resign ourselves when faced with a person who contains so much negativity, who always behaves in an excessive and unpleasant way, who despises everything and everyone, without ever enjoying anything, especially if she is the one who brought us into the world.
Angela is a fictional character to the nth degree, a figure who is always at the center of the scene, a scene populated by many characters, not least a colorful and nuanced Naples.
Page after page Franchini’s powerful writing goes through this enigma without ever managing to truly reveal it, but restoring the fire that this woman carries inside, devouring her and burning everything around her. It takes a lot of courage to be able to tell this story and Franchini has it in spades, along with a rare narrative ability.
The author
Antonio Franchini was born in Naples in 1958. He made his debut in 1992 with the collection Comrades. Four short stories about growing up. Passionate and practicing martial arts, in 1996 he published When will you kill yourself master?, partly autobiographical story-meditation. Sport is always the underlying theme of the stories of Water, sweat, ice (1998) and the portrait gallery Gladiators (2005), where the challenge becomes a pretext for an investigation of the human soul. He is also the author of the essay When we write when we are young (1996). For Marsilio he published Read own sell burn (2022) e The fire you carry inside you (2024).
Antonio Franchini, The fire you carry inside youVenice, Marsilio, 2024.
