Il fuoco che ti porti dentro

Il fuoco che ti porti dentro tells the story of the life and death of Angela, a woman of impossible character. A woman who embodies all the horrors of Italy: Qualunquism, racism, classism, selfishness, opportunism, transformism, a half-culture worse than ignorance, resentment…’.This woman was the author’s mother. The novel is an investigation into a woman’s life, passions and hatreds, in search of a possible explanation. The form is that of comedy, the content that of tragedy. What overt or covert experience, what frustration, what hidden wound can make us so hostile, so angry, so resistant to any form of appeasement? What motive, simple or complex, lies behind Angela’s rage: the war that marked her as a child? A father who died too soon, or a mother who died too late, depriving her of youth and maturity? An atavistic inferiority complex or belonging to the culture of the oppressed South, whose reasons Angela wants to assert against the hated usurper North? Or, more simply, is the inner fire that consumes her as unreasonable as the hidden heart of a volcano? Antonio Franchini has written, with skill and moderation, excess and discretion, a novel-memoir populated by characters around a protagonist who is always at the centre. An excessive and unpredictable heroine, capable of alternating dramatic and obsessive tones with decidedly comic moments. It is a story that mixes Edwardian comedy with chthonic fury, the urgency of a visceral outburst with the studied cadences of staging, of a real play.