Atmosphere in the Arriaga ten minutes before the start of the presentation. /
The mayor hopes that a film will be made based on ‘Waiting for the flood’, a criminal plot that takes place in the Bilbao of floods
The Arriaga is experiencing a full house this afternoon. the atmosphere of the great theatrical evenings, on the occasion of the presentation of the new novel by Dolores Redondo, ‘Waiting for the flood’ (Destiny). A book in which the city, and the theater itself, is the protagonist and in which he describes in detail the environment that existed in 1983, just before the floods. One of the characters is the journalist Ramón García, then a young announcer with a popular success program and who today is precisely the one who chats with the author on stage.
The public has exhausted the invitations that had to be reserved in the same theater to accompany Dolores Redondo and hear first-hand how the idea of incorporating Bilbao –and not just any Bilbao but the one of the unforgettable August 1983– arose on the stages of his criminal plots. A thousand people have filled the towns with the commotion that occurs on big occasions; an expectation similar to the one that has surrounded the editorial launch, one of the most powerful in recent years. The act was attended by the lehendakari, the councilor Josu Erkoreka and the mayor, Juan Mari Aburto, who has expressed his wish that he shoot a film based on the novel.
“Storms without and within”
The author has seen her commitment to the city reciprocated, which will soon have a literary route –cafeterias, discos, meeting places, newsstands, streets, shop windows and corners– to follow in the footsteps of the murderer of women John Biblia and the policeman bent on catch it. Despite her serious health problems, Sherrington travels to Bilbao because she believes that is where the criminal is hiding, based on a real character who killed at least three women in Glasgow in the late sixties.
The search goes through places that are perfectly recognizable for the people of Bilbao and also for the author. “The flood left its mark on me,” she recounted in an interview with this newspaper while she was touring Casco Viejo. «I was returning from a trip and from the train I saw the horror of what had happened. My imagination makes it even more serious because that happened in Greater Bilbao ». In her novels «there are storms, outside and inside. They are storms that shake the characters.