Litera Publishing House invites you on Wednesday, April 17, at 7:00 p.m., to the launch of the novel “The Castle in my City” by Ioana Bâldea Constantinescu, which will take place in the Media Room of the Bucharest National Theater (TNB – Nicolae Bălcescu Boulevard no. 2).
The writers Ioana Pârvulescu, Radu Paraschivescu and Bogdan Alexandru Stănescu are participating, along with the authors. The event will be followed by an autograph session. Access to the event is free, subject to availability, based on a reservation on the following link: https://forms.gle/aGp6jttVkMqKyjuFA
In the Jewish quarter of Bucharest, next to a yellow building, decrepit in its interwar elegance, an elderly gentleman and his golden cocker spaniel walk every day. From across the road, from behind a window, their paths are followed by little Sebastian and his parents. Around the yellow house, the Castle, as it is called in the neighborhood, the seasons, hydrangeas, faces and the world change, and Hanno and Spatzi's promenade remains the only natural anchor in a time that is no longer the same.
One of the legends that explain the presence of the Saxons in Transylvania is the Pied Piper of Hamelin, collected and transformed into a fairy tale by the Brothers Grimm. In Strasbourg in 1518, inexplicably, several people dance until they die of exhaustion, in a fatal fervor known as the “dancing epidemic”. The yellow castle in the Jewish quarter gathers them all and links their histories like the notes on the lines of a portable. And Hanno, Martha, Clara, Liese, Hanne, Sebastian and even Spatzi each put themselves in their place, in a “Bruder Jakob” that flows incessantly. Even when the book is long over.
Ioana Bâldea Constantinescu about the novel “The Castle from my town”: “This book is for all those whose world is shaking. Who hide in the burrows of their heads. Who lose pieces of who they are. And who cling to the shards of unreal beauty in which they loved and were loved. Maybe this it means, in fact, to be saved (…) Frau Troffea dances in the streets of Strasbourg and in her uncontrolled movement the greatest epidemic of dance in 16th century Europe is born. I think this is also literature for me – a dance with oblivion, with death, with loss, with everyday humanity, in the music from which foxes, castles and dogs drawn with chalk on the asphalt are born”.
