Monday 3 June, at 9pm in the new and evocative Washerwomen’s Park, the writer Eraldo Baldini will present his latest novel “The long cold shadows” published by Rizzoli. Marco Sangiorgi will introduce the free entry evening.
“The long cold shadows” tells of Fausto and Birgit, both prisoners of the Mauthausen concentration camp, and right there, during the liberation by the Americans, they met: he, an Italian soldier, she, a German political prisoner. They know very little about each other, yet the urgency of leaving that hell behind and the strength of a saving love push them to build a new life together and start a family in Fausto’s hometown. Theirs is a daily life made up of small things, a simple existence, far from worldliness, in a house in the midst of what remains of the wild Romagna marshes. But there are shadows in Birgit’s heart, silent and persistent, that torment her: no one knows anything about her origins and her life before moving to Italy, and she is always reluctant, even with her husband, to recall memories that are perhaps too painful . And when a new tragedy strikes the family, the muddy water of a dark past brings to the surface, little by little, a wreck of secrets relegated for too long to the rooms of a wounded memory.
Eraldo Baldini, noir writer, specializes in cultural anthropology and ethnography. In his novels he was able to combine “rural gothic”, noir and horror in an original vein. He began writing essays in this sector and arrived at fiction in the 90s. In 1991 he won the Cattolica Myfest with the story Re carnevale. He writes a long series of novels, including two for children: The Strange Summer (EL editions, 1997) and The Doors of Time (Disney Avventura, 2001). His notoriety came with the novel Mal’aria (Frassinelli 1998, 2003), also published in France, with which he won the prestigious “Fregene” prize. Among his books we remember Come il wolf (Einaudi, 2006) with which he won the “Predazzo” prize.
The event is curated by Patrizia Randi, Claudio Nostri and Marco Sangiorgi, with the patronage of the Municipality of Lugo. All meetings are offered free to the public (excluding convivial evenings). The complete program is available on the website http://caffeletterariolugo.blogspot.it.
