My Shadow Is Yours - A Novel

Informationen zum Autor Edoardo Nesi Klappentext "Recent college graduate Emiliano accompanies a 60 something writer, Vittorio, to a Milan fair where he will give a talk, breaking a 20 year long silence. "I have no house, only a shadow. But whenever you are in need of a shadow, my shadow is yours." This is a story, a love story, started forty years ago and never ended. And it is also the story of a trip to Italy in 2019, epic and comical, inebriated and amazed, very foolish, undertaken in a 1979 Jeep without a roof or doors or windshield by Emiliano De Vito, a just graduated summa cum laude in classical studies, and Vittorio Vezzosi, the writer of a single book, published in 1995 to worldwide acclaim, who has since shut himself up in a farmhouse above Florence without writing another word. While these two misfits of different generations are quarreling on their trip to Milan, they soon come to complement and understand one another in their differences"-- Leseprobe The First Time He Saw Me     The first time he saw me, Vezzosi greeted me with shotgun blasts. For fear of getting there late I had left the house way early, and it wasn’t even nine o’clock yet when I came to a very elegant wrought iron gate, all decorated with ornate figures, in front of which the horrendous mule path I had been following for kilometers came to an end. Through the ample empty spaces between the decorations, I could see a big lawn and two giant oak trees that cast their shadows over the façade of the bulky box of bare stone that was Vezzosi’s house, immersed in absolute stillness. I turned off my motor scooter and tried calling the number they had given me, but no one answered. I took a look around. There was no doorbell, only a chain hanging from a little bronze bell. When I pulled on it, the bell swung back and forth in total silence: there was no clapper. I was still smiling about that when I heard the loud blasts of three shots and the whiz of the bullets grazing by me. I ran over to a tree and flattened myself against its trunk, my back toward the house, my hammering heart vibrating in my temples. “This guy’s crazy,” I told myself in dismay, gasping with fear, as I saw stretching out before me the twisting, dusky mule path, marred by potholes and razor-sharp rocks that I had just rode over to get where I was, the gloomy stand of oak trees where I’d been forced to take refuge, the cliff-like precipice I’d had to ride over, the clearing that had suddenly opened up in front of me, mysteriously, to reveal the desolate hilltop that the hulking house was perched on. “A raving lunatic,” I concluded, and then I turned toward the house again and saw a guy running down the slope of the lawn, with something in hand. Terrorized, I leaped onto my scooter, turned it on, and gave it so much gas that the wheels skidded out from under me on the dirt road and both of us fell to the ground, me and the scooter. I sprang to my feet and was about to run away down the mule path, when I heard my name called: “Doctor De Vito!” I turned around. The gate had opened, and about fifty feet away from me there was a Black guy with silver hair, coming toward me. He must have been fifty years old, maybe a little older. When he got close, I saw that his skin was really dark, and there was a shiny little gold ring sticking out of his left earlobe. “Good morning, Doctor,” he said with a little gasp. “I’m Mamadou, we spoke on the phone.” “Oh, yes, sure. Good morning, Mamadou.” I held out my right hand, which he closed briefly in an iron grip. “Welcome. Go right on up to the house. Don’t worry, it’s safe.” And he turned on the brightest smile I had ever seen in my life. It wasn’t only the effect of the contrast between his white teeth and his skin; his whole face was smiling: eyes, mouth, cheeks all seemed to melt into a network of wrinkles to compose a portrait of benevolence. It was impo...

Product details

• Authors: Gregory Conti, Edoardo Nesi
• Publisher: Other press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 12.09.2023
• EAN: 9781635420685
• ISBN: 978-1-63542-068-5
• No. of pages: 288
• Dimensions: 133 mm x 202 mm x 19 mm
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature