Synopsis
Fabrizio's Passion is the author's English-language version of his French-language novel, Avril ou l'anti-passion (VLB editeur,1990). The original book made it to the best-seller list when it first appeared in 1990. This baroque novel, divided into twenty-five chapters, explores the different facets of an Italian family living in North America. It is through the technique of a multivoiced narrative that the readers are permitted to see what might constitute a possible portrait of the ethnic family in our American pluricultural societies. The novel begins with the disasters of World War II and Lina's diary which she kept during the Nazi invasion of the Abruzzi and takes us to Guido's love letters to his girlfriend Lina before his departure for Canada; the growing-up pains of the Canadian-born children Fabrizio and Lucia; Lucia's marriage to a French-Canadian who no longer speaks his mother tongue; the grandmother's death that suddenly gives new significance to this family's cultural responsibilities; and finally ends with Fabrizio's painful attempt at shooting a film on Sophocles' Antigone in the 1980s.