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The nightmare

Apr 162012

Everyone has his borderline experiences. I had had one of these in Paris a few years before I started working as a tourist guide for Paris Vision. My existential angst, which I had long been keeping under control by sheer will power, suddenly exploded. Then a nauseating, gloomy, intolerable vision of life took hold of me, possessed me. There was no escape from it. I hated everything, death above all. Just the idea of it terrified me, made me feel powerless, rebellious, neurotic. I felt trapped, couldn’t free my mind and my gut of these destructive, negative feelings. I even despised the world that man had constructed, a world that I knew something of by then, having had personal experience of it. I knew what it meant to work, to struggle to survive. I tried to find an acceptable comparison between living with human animals and living with animal animals, such as goats, and I couldn’t find one. Goat society seemed to me to be a million times better than human society. Goats don’t kill each other, they live pacifically together. I had become convinced that any other animal on earth, however brutal, could not possibly have created such a false, bestial society.

The dream

Brief autobiography No Responses »

Apr 132012

At the beginning of the Seventies, I began to give French and Italian lessons to small groups of students in private schools – International School of Languages, Holmes Language School, Berlitz Language school in Melbourne. I would have liked to have had a deeper, more academic knowledge of these languages but what I did have was, in any case, more than adequate for my courses.

A few years later, with some financial help from a friend, and sticking to my principle, if other people can be successful why shouldn’t I be ?, I opened a language school: European School of Languages, in the centre of the town where I was living. I would never have expected it to be such an amazing success; it was incredible. In the space of a few years about twenty-five part-time mother-tongue teachers were teaching at the European School of Languages and all the classrooms were constantly in use. Fantastic!

The leap

Brief autobiography No Responses »

Mar 132012

When I was sixteen, resolute in the face of my mother’s objections, I went away, leaving my family, my animals, the place where I was born, and I set off for northern Italy.

In Turin I slept in cold, dark, wretched garages, with snow on the roof and water dripping inside. Sometimes I lived in dilapidated, filthy houses where there was no toilet, no drinking water, nothing at all, only a dirty mattress on the floor where you slept in your clothes beside strangers. Most of the time I worked on building sites.

My first love story, with a girl from Reggio Emilia, ended painfully. She was semiliterate and so was I: we had no future. And I wanted to go back to school, I wanted to study.

In spite of the industrial atmosphere of the city and the tough life I led there I liked Turin: it opened my eyes, awoke in me a taste for life and for a world that I was impatient to discover.

Italian author looks for English publisher

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Dec 192011

I am Francis. I was born in 1942 in South Italy. At nine I started to work. At sixteen I left South Italy. From sixteen to thirty I worked and studied. At thirty I found my first decent job: I was employed as a guide in a travelling agency in Paris. From then on my life changed; from then on my life was my “life”.

In Melbourne, Australia, in the Seventies, I opened a school: European school of languages. Towards the end of the Seventies, I sold it.

Again travelling and studying. I’ve got three diploms, two from universities and one from a college. I wrote four novels, three collections of short stories, Orazio Guglielmini’s will: four books, and an essay: For a perennial philosophy. Actually I hold a course in the “art of living” at the University of Biella.

I am looking for a publisher.