The parental figure is one of the cornerstones of the novels shortlisted for the 2024 Campiello Prize. Antonio Franchini’s uncomfortable mother is one of them. The fire you carry inside youit is Mario Trevi, father of Emanuele, author of the The Wizard’s Housethe second and last book that the jury of literary scholars included in the top five in the first round of voting, last May. The latest work by the Roman writer – already winner of the 2021 Strega Prize with Two lives – it is not always easy to read, not so much for the writing, always clear and captivating, but for a constant hopping between biographical and autobiographical story, philosophical, psychoanalytic essay, and historical narration. It is an alternation of temporal and thematic levels, which Trevi exploits with mastery, according to his own narrative needs.

What is it about and why you should read “The Fire That You Bring Inside”, finalist at the Campiello

The Wizard’s House is a novel of people and places, starting from those that give shape to the title: the one who with his ‘magic’ has the power to heal and change people, and the place where he practiced his profession. Mario Trevi was a famous psychoanalyst of international fame, among the pioneers of the Jungian approach in Italy; a character in the true sense of the word, distant and distracted in his own way, a fine thinker, a thoughtful man, for his son a healer of souls.

Upon his death, his children’s attempts to sell his apartment-studio are all in vain, no one wants it. So Emanuele decides to buy the part inherited from his sister and make it his own home. Taking possession of that house, for the author, is an experience at times mystical. From the walls of what was once The in his father’s place, in fact, the “invisible vapors” of the crooked lives that he has tried to straighten out for years seem to transpire.

Trevi’s novel is not a biography of his father in the strict sense, it does not have the ambition, but through episodes of real life – from his youth to the war, from his approach to psychoanalysis to his separation from his teacher – his character traits emerge forcefully, and his greatness (also) in his strangeness. The importance of the father, in the book, is equal to that of his Roman studio. After Mario’s death, it remains uninhabited, as already anticipated every attempt to purchase it fails, until it is his son himself who gives life back to the environments, all without distorting it, indeed maintaining its simulacra and ‘favoring’ even possible and mysterious presences within it.

Trevi talks about his father and talks about his studio-home, and at the same time, inevitably, he borders on autobiography, he does not fail to enrich and round out the narration with his own episodes of real life, starting from those with his father in Venice, during his childhood first and then adulthood, comical in their drama. In what happens after his death, however, the figure of the father remains vivid and present, if only because the apartment in which the author lives exudes his presence in every corner.

The Wizard’s Housewith its anything but linear progression and a plot whose importance is a secondary element in the economy of the novel, excites. And it does so because the author decides to put on the table all those feelings that throughout his life have tied him to a father who was sometimes spiritually distant: they are the sense of admiration, the love of a father for his son certainly, but also the curiosity towards a figure so enigmatic as to be “a smiling and moustachioed Rubik’s cube”, writes Trevi in ​​the prologue to his novel.

What is clear – or so it seems – is the author’s difficulty in distancing himself from his father and his memory. In fact, among the pages placed temporally after his death, one perceives more than once the son’s bewilderment, sometimes a marked sense of loneliness: having pitched his tent in the old house of his ‘old man’, perhaps, has a deeper sense than the simple need to have one’s own space in the world.