Franco Stelzer was born in Trento in 1956.
He spent many years in Bologna and Germany: he was a teacher and translator from German . For Einaudi he published Ano di volpi argentate ( 2000) Il nostro primo, solenne, stranissimo Natale senza di lei ( 2003) Cosa diremo agli angeli ( 2018) and for Maestrale Matematici nel sole ( 2009) .
Title: Light stretcher
Author: Franco Stelzer
Publisher: hopefulmonster
Rights: r. vivian literary agency
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Kane
5.0 out of 5 stars Refined prose
Reviewed in Italy on 10 August 2023
Purchase verified
Stelzer tells a delicate and poignant love story with exquisite prose and creates an unforgettable character, Bodo.
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Paolo Dellachà
5.0 out of 5 stars It would take more books like this one
Reviewed in Italy on July 1, 2023
Purchase verified
Dry, rigorous and effective writing.
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Bergamo Award Winner 2024
Bodo lives with his mother near the Lorettoberg (Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany). Bodo and his mother work in their workshop: washing, ironing. Bodo likes ironing shirts. Pillowcases, less so. Whenever possible, before going to sleep, he looks out of the window and the breeze coming down from the Lorettoberg comforts him. Bodo falls asleep melancholy and serene. He is simple-hearted, but has sometimes unsettling enthusiasms, kept calm pharmacologically. Bodo loves his mother. Bodo falls in love with a customer. When she and her family return to her country just over the border in France, Bodo's love takes over all of Bodo. Bodo is a wonderful character, created by the art of Franco Stelzer, a master storyteller, a pen that does not write: it tattoos. Bodo is a gift Stelzer gives us, he is a presence we do not forget. The text has Central European sounds and ribbing, a soul that echoes non-Italian literature, but inlaid with a profoundly Italian language, as beautiful as a snow crystal. A tale whose precise and measured dose of enchantment makes the prose and its rhythm capable of painting such a creature, Bodo, adhering to its delicate dementia with all the complexity and intelligence of the voice that narrates it. The writer demonstrates extreme confidence of hand. His empathy for the figure he is inventing is total, with a hint of cruel harshness that concerns Bodo, but above all, exemplarily through him, all of us. This love story is a powerful whisper. The absolute pain that runs through it, however, only comes in second, because the winner, on a knife's edge, is instead a mysterious and inalienable happiness.
Title: Pardune is a lazy lover
Publisher: in submission
Agent: r.vivian literary agency
Pardune is a man in his seventies, gifted with a lazy, poetic and dreamy nature… He is attracted by the light story of the changes in his own body and that of his wife, Flun, his peer, whom he loves and who loves him and whose proud beauty of fifty years before he has never forgotten…
The real story begins, however, when the two, recently retired, protagonists of a peaceful life without major upheavals, with their grown and distant children, receive a visit from a little girl. The daughter of two mysterious neighbors, the little girl, evidently neglected by her parents, comes to disrupt their daily lives, settling into their home, effectively turning Pardune and Flun into grandparents.
Thus begins a joyful and intense period, a sort of youthful appendix bestowed upon them by fate. But this, of course, cannot last, because the authorities, alerted, intervene and entrust the little girl to a new, young family.
The little girl thus disappears from their lives, just as she had entered them, and this new situation reawakens a series of problems in their relationship, distancing them, making them colder.
Pardune, disoriented by his wife's unusual distance, struggles to cope with this new state of affairs and begins to turn much more outward. He begins a series of outdoor walks, which introduce him to many people and invariably lead him to engage with them in ways that are sometimes harsh, yet always bizarre and tinged with poetry, since, according to Pardune, the protagonists of those encounters are mostly incapable of honoring life in the most appropriate way. His wife initially maintains a very cold and disapproving attitude toward him; she is also concerned, because certain episodes seem to signal the beginning of a dangerous drift toward dementia. Yet, she will unexpectedly end up expressing a deep approval of her husband's behavior, which leads them to reconnect and rediscover the true nature of their mutual understanding. Pardune's stormy encounters, however, set in motion a series of events that result in the couple being confined to a nursing home. Here, again, Pardune's poetry and her vibrant strength bring the story to a dramatic and yet poetically liberating conclusion.