There are freedoms that are conquered with weapons, others that are defended in the streets, still others that are questioned every day, in the world of work and personal relationships. «The soul seeks something else» (E/O) follows these trajectories without necessarily making them coincide, connecting three generations who fought to be free, despite everything. After two books dedicated to publishing – «The tools of the trade» and «L’editore presuntuoso» – for the publisher Sandro Ferri, who is the co-founder together with his wife Sandra of the E/O publishing house – this is his debut in the world of fiction, completing his authorial journey, telling the consequences of choices, the price of ideals, the fractures that a family goes through during a journey that embraces the Italian twentieth century.
The memoir is built on three narrative levels that do not seek a pacifying synthesis.
There is the father, Rigo, a partisan in occupied Romagna, leading a brigade of anarchists and communists against Nazi-fascism: for Rigo, freedom was war, violence accepted as a historical necessity, but also risk, gambling, the will to force destiny. Not a monumental hero, rather a man who passes through history but remains marked by it.
There is Sandro, the son, who in the Seventies – narrated between Bologna and militancy in Lotta Continua – is firmly convinced that individual freedom cannot ignore the collective, already aware that every choice produces a fracture of values.
Finally, the gaze turns to the present and the future with Eva, the daughter, the heir called to lead the English headquarters of the publishing house in the midst of Brexit: her freedom passes through entrepreneurial risk, the redefinition of a cultural project in an arduous if not hostile economic and political context. Even at the cost of clashing with the founders, Eva will take on the burden of questioning long-established practices and habits, establishing a new trajectory.
Three eras, three variations of family history that run quickly, a saga full of events. And a message: freedom is not transmitted as a linear inheritance but is redefined, cracked, necessarily exposed to generational conflict.
“Onironautics”, the practice of lucid dreams, intervenes to link these plans. It is not a literary game nor a symbolic quirk, it is the desire to enter a territory where historical memory is no longer enough. The dream thus becomes a space of direct confrontation, in which the son tries to ask his father what reality has never allowed him to clarify. Sandro meets his father, joins him in the battlefields of the Resistance, then in American emigration and in the casinos of Atlantic City, where freedom and chance come dangerously close. When the accounts remain open, the imagination is the only place in which to return to questioning the past without taming it.
The pages fly but the question remains suspended: what is freedom, and how much are we willing to risk to defend it? In no case does it appear as a definitive achievement. Every choice involves a loss, a breakup, sometimes a betrayal.
Ferri does not construct a family epic nor a triumphant autobiography; avoid the temptation to transform your story into a personal myth and let ambiguities emerge. Even when the three lives seem to meet – in the dream set in Rome in 1944, in the days of the attack on Via Rasella – there is no definitive reconciliation and the writing remains sober, sometimes elliptical, more interested in moral turning points than in the spectacularization of events.
The verses of Costantino Kavafis inspire the title but freedom is not a destination, if anything a search that does not guarantee consolations. Taking it seriously means accepting that the risk is not an accident, but part of the choice made.