Inside The Fire: A Tale of the Insane

The story takes place in Marseilles. Marseilles is a poor city in the South of France. It is a gate to Europe coming through the sea from North Africa. It was created more than 2000 years ago by Greek settlers coming from the town of Phocea, now on the Turkish coast.Marseilles is today famous in Europe as a city of corruption and violence.In this city was born an insane poet Antonin Artaud who wrote amazing books in the first part of the XXth century and is studied everywhere nowadays. However Artaud went mad and spent about ten years in an asylum in the last part of his life, all through WWII. Treated through intensive electroshock, he remained toothless after that.Artaud is being referenced in the book by the nickname that his mother gave him as a child “Nanaqui,” which is also the one he uses in his own writing.In this tale, Nanaqui comes back from the dead to visit us, with his companion Ivan (the Narrator). He is as obscene, crude, maniac, and delirious as a living dead could be. He meets a witch, Sarah, who drops by Marseilles on the way to the film festival of Cannes. Nanaqui wants to have an affair with her, but it turns out that she prefers a penguin to him (the penguin turns out to be gay actually).The story could be read as a modern tale taking place in the blazing heat of Marseilles, by the Mediterranean Sea, a shore haunted by hundreds of years of decaying civilizations, and through Nanaqui, our hero by the spirit of both greatness and madness. This book contains adult content, minimal punctuation, explicit language and is not suited for those below 18 years.+