The Fire You Carry Within

Angela is a woman with a difficult personality. According to her son, she embodies all the horrors of an angry Italy: “political apathy and distrust, racism, classism, selfishness, opportunism, trasformismo, a half-culture that is worse than ignorance, resentment..." What reason, simple or complex, lies beyond Angela's fury? The war, which marked her childhood? A father who died too early or a mother who died too late? An inferiority complex linked to being originally from a village in Southern Italy? In tracing her life as a mother, in examining her passions and hatreds as a woman, in searching for a possible explanation for such inconsistent and irrational behaviour, this son realises that perhaps it is just an inner fire that is left free to devour her, without any barrier. The Fire You Carry Within fits into the genre of family memoirs where the critical relationship between mother and child is the focal point around which the narrative is built. This is not, however, a post-mortem outburst of one party against another, nor is it a need for mourning. It is rather an “exercise in style” in the creation of the characters themselves. Franchini's objective was to portray Angela in a way that reflected her true identity. Or rather, the character that she created for herself in the course of her life, and which she continued to recite in a continuous and timely manner until the end of her days. It is only as she gets older that she seems to become aware of the evil she has done and received, and briefly loses sight of "the script". But that only lasts a few moments. The fire she carries within her leaves her no respite and immediately returns to consume her, to make her life impossible and unchangeable. As if in a game of mirrors, Angela's harsh figure is reflected in the author's crude (bordering on repulsive) writing. As a kind of counterbalance to the mother's "populist" nature, her son, a writer, responds with a high and refined style, in which every word seems to have been carefully chosen to create an emotional, powerful effect, capable of aligning itself with vivid characters and extraordinary situations in their ordinariness. His style is not that of an intimate novel or a diary, but that of a novel that seeks to explore the mechanisms behind the creation and narration of a character, even above the story.  

Il fuoco che ti porti dentro
Antonio Franchini
Marsilio, 2024