Chiara Francini presents her novel “Oaks don’t make lemons”

L'Tuscan actress, television host, show woman and author Chiara Francini, in the evocative setting of the church of Puntamare in Vico Equense, presented at dusk her new novel for Rizzoli Editore, “Le querce non fanno limoni”.

The text was presented as part of “Libri a tramonto” and this literary event was organized by the Ubik bookshop of the same city. The Mary hotel supported the initiative as a sponsor.

“Le querce non fanno limoni” is a novel with a historical background and a choral structure, intimate and political, which spans fifty years of Italian history – from the Second World War to the Years of Lead – intertwining personal and collective events, passions and wounds, Resistance and reconstruction.

The protagonist is Delia, a former partisan who faces war, love, loss and the weight of memory. Around her takes shape the Cantuccio, a concrete and symbolic place, a refuge and stronghold of humanity and sharing. Around the protagonist moves a chorus of vibrant characters - Irma, Mauro, Angela, Carlo, Sandro, Lettèria, Gigione and many others - whose stories intertwine in a plot rich in dialects, scars and dreams, woven like a tapestry of voices.

Set between Florence and Campi Bisenzio, the novel gives shape and bears witness to history in an unprecedented way – the torture at Villa Triste, the Liberation, the Piazza Fontana massacre, the contradictions of the extra-parliamentary left – but filters it through everyday life, like pots on the fire, silences that weigh more than words, gestures that resist time.

The language is alive, mobile, captivating in its jousting alternation: it alternates lyricism and popular speech, singsong and concreteness. A writing by Francini's pen that is comparable to an ancient box set that inherits affective, political and ideological factors of the years on which the plot hinges.

The mission is to bring back a collective memory through subjective narratives. The memory resurfaces, consciences are moved and awakened. It is a hymn to the courage to face the past to build a future, without being overwhelmed, but not even forgetting.

Precisely by virtue of this, Francini articulates the narrative elements around places that symbolize a call to one's roots, placing the focus on the concept of historical and human truth, the starting point and essential foundation for writing and for restoring dignity to readers, writers and all those who have experienced certain historical, social and political situations.

“The story is contemporary, but it also looks to the future. It is a book that, precisely in the current historical phase we are living, can be read with an eye to the present and therefore to the future,” the author explained.

She chose a title that is extremely emblematic and symbolic, evocative and metaphorical. “It’s a phrase my mother always repeated to me,” she explained her choice. “It can be both sweet and devastating, as mothers’ phrases often are. It can mean that you never really distance yourself from your roots, but also that not everyone is born in the right place to flourish. If you’re born in a lemon garden, you’ll probably grow crooked… and most likely, you can be cut down. And so, if you want to stay there, you have to resist.”

Particularly complex and significant is Delia, introduced to the audience with these words: “She didn’t fight the Resistance with weapons, she didn’t kill, but she resisted all her life. She resisted disenchantment. She resisted abandonment. She resisted war, love. And she resisted, above all, shame — which is the first cloak that is put on us to control us.

Shame is an institutionalized weapon of mass manipulation. It serves to control human beings, and especially women. Because, unlike guilt, which affects what one does, shame affects what one is. My Delia has never been ashamed of existing. Shame is a complex feeling: it can be destructive, but also a powerful tool for knowledge.

Women know shame right away, from the first glance. Men, on the other hand, are not educated to shame: they are educated to victory, to success. When they feel shame, they reject it. They vomit it out, they unload it on others, often on women. Women know that pain is forgotten. They know that pain is part of life. We know it well. Because we women are used to bleeding once a month”.

A rich, conceptual, organized book divided between two historical ages and multiple characters. Chiara Francini has left nothing to chance and has attributed the same importance to the emotional and relational sphere of the characters as to the purely objective and political one. The personal dynamics established between the characters, in fact, faithfully reflect like a mirror the author's conception regarding the value of feelings of love and friendship.

“It must be said that the novel is also full of great love stories,” she said. “There are two in particular. There is a love story with this suitor that we would all like to have, not for what he has, but for what he is. There is always a question of responsibility, of ethics. Because then, in the end, all of us authors crumble what we are in our books. And I, obviously, the men in my life – especially my father – have nurtured the great heroes that I carry within me. They have his integrity, his ethics.

The character of Sandro is a multifaceted and wonderful character. In the Seventies there is another great love story, which has as its protagonist a girl named Irma. Irma is an exotic girl physically, of course, but also internally, as often happens to young girls.

She comes from a bourgeois family, and at a certain point she enters the “corner”, and receives what we all would like to receive: she says «Can I come in? I have nowhere else to go», and everyone, without even thinking twice, says yes. So Irma enters the “corner” and becomes friends especially with two other young girls: Angela, this girl with the scent of lavender, and Letteria, the Sicilian girl. I have always thought that friendship is the supreme feeling of love, because it is devoid of parental implications.

I do not love you because you are my father, my mother, my brother, my sister. Friendship is the supreme feeling of love because it is devoid of sexual implications. I do not love you because I make love to you: I love you because I recognize you as a brother, as a sister. Friendship is love for love, it is being together without having to ask for anything in return.

This is what we see in the journey of these three girls: it is as if they were holding hands. Irma has never attended university, and so she goes, she finally goes to university. Today, young people meet and observe each other on social media, but back then they looked for each other in politics, in the streets. Not that they were better, they also shouted, but there was this enormous hunger for justice, this need”.

Chiara Francini, in the final moments, greeted her audience with a paradigmatic phrase that was indicative of the purpose of her writing, that is, “a happy life means having fought. “I hope that this book highlights the importance of stimulating one’s critical sense on every occasion – and she concluded – The right things, the true things, are almost never easy to obtain but the fight is intended as awareness and as liberation”.