Publishing house: Europe Books
Pages: 212
Price: 13,90 euro
Exit date: giugno 2023
After The Westerner (2017) and The Perfect Woman (2018), Melanie Francesca changes tone: leaving comedy and satire behind, she takes us to a more intimate level by investigating the nature of feelings and suffering, laying bare those wounds that since childhood determine the trajectory of our lives and our choices. Nothing is ever forgotten, but things are transformed, transmuting the lead of despair into the gold of understanding.
The Angel is a book infused with magic, destined to open the doors to consciousness.
“The author spares no one, not even herself… Sometimes she surprises you with the dullest of aches, on other occasions she overwhelms you with her tenderness, and lets out that subdued cry, full of yearning, that has been waiting too long to be released,like a subtle concert. But who is the author? A prism in perpetual motion, who turns the perspective upside down with dizzying contrivances of fresh literary prowess. Her striking achievement is to disorientate you, always. And drag you around like a whirlwind, until – out of the blue – the minuet.”
Barbara Alberti
“Melanie Francesca reminds us that contrasts, chiaroscuro and contradictions are part of the life of each of us, that beauty shines further emerging from the darkness and that in all this lies the strength and power of mankind. The artist has the courage to reflect clearly on life and, not without a touch of shrewd irony, to open a window to all of us on these meditations, overcoming fears and prejudices, letting herself be carried away by what she feels and she desires to share as an expression of his soul. From books, to poems, to works, the art of Melanie Francesca is a pressing invitation to enjoy the experience and the many facets and shades that the world, today as in the past, can offer us.”
Francesco Alberoni
The grammar of angels is learned by skinning the soul. Dixi’s angel is called Alan. The one she encounters one day in Père Lachaise cemetery, on Jim Morrison’s grave. And it is the verses of his songs that mark the times of each chapter, drops of poetry on a story that has a lot to say.
Corriere della Sera
Dixi is a model, her family of those where you would dream of being born. But only to not have to think about how to make ends meet. A leaf at the mercy of a storm points to a life at the limit which is not out of a desire for transgression, but a desire to escape. From conventions, from the obvious, from safe and flat everyday life. Loves are an attempt to understand who she is, but it is an experience that takes her where she would not want, in a contrast between the earthly and the spiritual. Alan is an angel who lives in symbiosis with the creature he must guard and protect. Dixi knows that it is there and it is enough to make her sink into her soul and then raise above the mud she breathes. An intimate story that does not discount herself into honeyed feelings and a glamorous cover. In today’s Paris that remains a timeless capital, with an angel that seems to have remained in the world that preceded the Enlightenment. For Dixi drawn of legend and dreams… Of life and depths of souls that open wide to the breath of the world.
Corriere della Sera
Melanie, revelation of literature and media celebrity… Books written at full speed, with cinematic rhythm and immediacy.
La Stampa
It’s Paris, at the beginning of the 2000s. An angel falls in love with Dixi, a fragile girl who works as a model. Born into a wealthy French family with bourgeois roots, Dixi has had to bring herself up, a girl lost in a chaotic life with neither rules nor future, and now at the mercy of a gypsy with whom she is hopelessly in love and who drags her, playing with her feelings, into a series of dark events. The spirit, Alan, follows her everywhere, until he reveals himself to her in the churches where Dixi finds refuge and comfort. “You have to observe yourself when you feel a painful emotion, because that is the door to self-awareness.”