Romanzo senza umani

A man walks along the shores of a large German lake. He left suddenly, after having caused a series of ’emotional accidents’, as he calls them. He plunged back into the lives of people he had not seen for a long time. He answered emails that had remained there for fifteen years, asking misplaced questions. He tried to reknit broken threads. Mauro Barbi, a historian by profession, tries to mend the memories of others – the people he loves and has loved – by offering his version of events. He tries to construct a ‘shared memory’ that concerns him. But what business is that? Perhaps it has something to do with a private Little Ice Age, a cooling process that has depopulated his existence. Where are Fiore, Arno, old Cardolini, Meri, the Belgian girl from Madrid? Where is Anna? Where are they all? Perhaps the lake to which he has devoted years of study can give him the answers he seeks. He sees, or rather imagines, the immense sheet of ice that covered it from shore to shore four and a half centuries before. The pale sun on a pile of dead birds. A very long winter that swept across Europe with its polar winds, furious hailstorms, floods. A remote extreme season that made people gnash their teeth, lose hope, go mad. How did one get out of it? How does one get out of it? Images of the past always deceive us. Barbi tries to re-enter the present, with all the anxiety and fatigue that simple gestures require. One in particular could change everything. In his Romanzo senza umani, where humans are in focus more than ever, Paolo Di Paolo interrogates the climatic disasters of our individual lives. The years without summer, the furious desires like tropical downpours, the dryness of hope, the frost that numbs and hides. And then the thaw, which finally brings back the light. What do they remember, the others, about us?