Third meeting of the seventh edition of the Reading Group "The Garden"
"I Stay Here" by Marco Balzano
Reading and commentary by Guido Olmastroni
The work:
The water has submerged everything: only the tip of the bell tower emerges from the lake. On the bottom are the remains of the village of Curon. We are in South Tyrol, a land of borders and tears: a place where not even your mother tongue is something that belongs to you all the way. When Mussolini outlawed German and even the names on tombstones were changed, then, in order not to lose one's identity, one has only to try to tell. Trina is a young mother who to the wound of the community adds her own: she constantly invokes the name of her daughter, who disappeared without a trace. Since then she has never stopped waiting for her, writing to her, in the hope that words can return her to her. Until war comes knocking on the door of the house, and Trina follows her deserter husband into the mountains, where they both learn to live with death. Then the long postwar period, which brings no peace. And so, as the reader follows the story of this family and would like to reach out to Trina, he suddenly finds himself rushed to observe, one day after another, the construction of the dam that will flood the houses and streets, the sorrows and illusions, the rebellion and loneliness.
Author:
Marco Balzano was born in Milan in 1978. For Sellerio, he published the novels Pronti a tutte le partenze (2013) L' ultimo arrivato (2014), Il figlio del figlio (2016), while for the publisher Einaudi, in addition to Resto qui (2018), he published Le parole sono importanti (2019) and Quando tornerò (2021).
Texts and event by The Garden Social Center