Francesca Maccani returns to Trentino with ‘Your name in the woods’

With ‘Your name in the woods’, published by Rizzoli, Francesca Maccani returns to her native land with a novel set in Bondone, the extreme edge of Trentino, in 1961. A place of woods, coal, memories of war and border tensions, where the arrival of a ‘foreigner’ girl, Adele, it breaks the balance of a closed community and forces everyone to deal with a secret buried in the past.

More than a character, explains the author, the book comes from a place and what that place represents. “The novel also arises from a way of being in the world,” says Maccani. The idea emerged during a summer walk at Bondone castle, in front of “a particular light” and “a silence that seemed to guard stories”. From there, he says, it became clear that the new book needed to get into “something that calls you and annihilates you at the same time.”

Bondone is not a simple background. AND a historical and human microcosmchosen by Maccani to tell a threshold moment. “As Italy changes, the peasant world is about to transform. Bondone, at that moment, is a perfect ideal place to tell a before and after”, explains the writer, originally from Trentino and resident in Palermo for years.

The story of a mistrustful community, crossed by never-ending resentments, and of women who “with their strength keep entire worlds standing”, in the novel the invisible force that holds families and countries is the female one: a force of care, of mediationbut also of destruction when necessary. In the book, underlines the author, what emerges above all is “the disinterested solidarity that arises when you recognize your own wounds in a sister”.

Above all, Gianna, the woman who welcomes Adele under her roof, embodies this dimension. A strong and shy figure, who does not show himself willingly. In the first chapters, she is the first to recognize the gravity of the situation and protect the young woman, while the town watches and judges.

Maccani says he built Gianna starting from a teacher who really existedbut above all as a synthesis of “all the mountain women” known: “solid, silent, capable of holding up the world without ever a complaint”.

Adele, however, also has a decisive role. In the novel he arrives at the town tavern looking for Bortolo, a young coal burner, and his mere presence is enough to upset an already fragile balance.

The writer defines it as a “detonator” that carries its own story forcing an entire community to look in the mirror. It is through her, he explains, that a “closed, protective, supportive but also judgmental” country shows all its cracks.

The border issue is one of the most important in the book. Not only because Bondone is a marginal land, where history has left traces in the language, surnames, affiliations, but because for Maccani the border is first of all internal. “The border is a condition of the soul even before a line on the map,” he states. It is a definition that dialogues with the very structure of the novel, where the present of 1961 is intertwined with another, older narrative time, linked to the Great War, the transition from the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Italy and the formation of identities in a border land.

Then there is the forest, which already from the title establishes itself as symbolic center of the book. In Maccani’s writing it is not a naturalistic backdrop, but rather a living presence. It is refuge, proof, passage, guardian of what is kept silent. “The forest sees, preserves, swallows, gives back,” says the author. A narrative function that in the first chapters is immediately linked to the work of the men of the town, to wood, to the production of coal, that is to a very harsh material civilization that regulates hierarchies and destinies.

It is no coincidence that one of the key characters is Bortolo, the coal burner torn between desire and responsibility. Maccani imagines him as a man strong in body, educated in duty and unable to fully name what he feels. “The mountain men were strong in body, but often fragile in heart,” observes the writer. A fragility that removes the novel from any easy stereotype of the mountain as a place of only male harshness.

On the language level, Maccani chooses a precise path: to restore the breath of local speech without enclosing it in folklore or incomprehensibility. In the opening chapters they appear dialect words, cadences, vocabulary of work and peasant life; but the author explains that she searched for “a literary language” capable of containing that world without mechanically imitating it. A language, he says, that tastes “of earth, of work, of split wood”, while remaining readable and universal.

Finally, the historical component remains essential but never overwhelms the characters. Maccani says she has documented herself on the tensions of Alto Adige, on peasant life and on the memory of the war, also through family storiesbut that he followed a rule: “the story must serve the characters, not the other way around”.

It is a statement that explains well the structure of the novel which is not proposed as a historical fresco in the traditional sense and in which the collective past continues to live in private lives.

With ‘Your name in the woods’, Maccani brings into Italian fiction a story that speaks of roots, belonging, silences and transformations, bringing a border Trentino back to the center which is not just geography, but inner experience and living memory. A return to one’s homeland, after years of writing elsewhere, which for the author has the weight of a calling.