Last Summer in the City

June 21, 2021
Calligarich’s evocative English-language debut, originally published in Italy in 1973, follows the travails of a journalist in Rome. Leo Gazzara, 30, a self-described “pretentious snob... at the end of tether,” recalls his struggles of the previous year. Leo moved to Rome because of its proximity to the sea, which he’s always loved, and for a job at a magazine that soon went out of business, leaving him to find a spot at a sports newspaper. He meets Arianna at a party and they start seeing each other, though she rebuffs his first declaration of love. In May, they go to the sea, where they trespass on private beaches and in vacant vacation villas. In June, Leo starts and abandons a job in TV, sleeps with an ex, and tries to ignore Arianna, who is dating someone else. As Leo and his friend Graziano Castelvecchio write a film script, Calligarich conjures Italy’s piazzas, parties, beaches, and bars with a mood reminiscent of A Movable Feast, and the friends’ project is halted by an affecting tragedy. While Leo’s unexamined poor treatment of others, especially Arianna, feels a bit dated, the feeling that Leo is alone in the world is poignantly conveyed. The scenery alone makes this worth a look.

July 1, 2021
Thirty-year-old Leo Gazzara understands he has to find some purpose in life. A Milanese living in1970s Rome, he is a true romantic, someone who wishes he'd been born in Vienna before the end of the empire. "My friends had very clear ideas--graduate, get married, make money--but that was a prospect that repelled me," Leo says. Drowning in melancholy, and, often, in alcohol, he meets Arianna, a similarly tortured soul. Over the course of one summer, the two fall in and out of love, never quite understanding what to make of life's strange ways. Leo has a set of friends but they are mere accessories, hardly ever a good fit. Calligarich's novel enjoyed a cult following in Italy, and now it is the first of his works to be translated into English. His Rome is a vibrant entity in his descriptions of the Spanish Steps, Piazza Navona, and the bustling market stalls of Campo de' Fiori, while the sounds of summer--"voices in the trattorias on the square, the clatter of dishes, the melancholy sound of an out-of-tune trumpet"--lend a rich texture to this deeply haunting novel. Is there any place in society for those who refuse to color within the lines? This is a question that Leo struggles to answer. A marvel of a novel.

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Starred review from June 15, 2021
When nothing means anything, what do you grab onto to save yourself? Drifting aimlessly in a sea of alcohol, coffee, women, and cigarettes, Milanese transplant Leo Gazzara floats through life in Rome, buoyed by his collection of secondhand classic books and a loose network of friends (some similarly disaffected, some seeming to have goals or, at least, cash). Leo's attempts to create a more structured life--usually involving less alcohol and more employment--occur in waves and begin to take on more urgency when he encounters the troubled but alluring Arianna at a party at the home of more successful (and more settled) friends. Leo and a coasting soul mate, Graziano, mull over the causes of their estrangement from routine life and attempt a concerted effort to rescue themselves from slipping away entirely into adolce vita punctuated by drives to the sea or revivifying showers. Leo's own efforts to recognize and connect with a meaningful existence rely in no small part on what may be the enduring love of his life: books. Allusions to Proust, James Fenimore Cooper, and other masters echo throughout Calligarich's short but dense novel. Andre Aciman's epic foreword to this first American edition provides biographical and bibliographic context for Calligarich's novel, which was widely rejected before finally being published to acclaim in Italy in 1973 and, though falling in and out of print, developed a cultlike following over the years. The account of a lost generation in Rome in the early 1970s (possibly the children of the children of Hemingway's lost generation) carries the weight of both family history and generational saga. A portrait of a young man adrift in a world where meaning has been swept away.

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