Appearing in English for the first time since its original Italian publication in 1973, Gianfranco Calligarich's Last Summer in the City is both a notable literary rediscovery and an arresting study of bohemian ennui.
Leo Gazzara--whose name, his lover pointedly remarks, "sounds like a lost battle"--is adrift, languishing in the economic hangover following Italy's postwar boom. While his peers take to the pursuit of degrees, spouses and careers, Leo relocates from Milan to Rome, where his tenuous job prospects soon dry up. For Leo, to be in the city is to float through a fog of malaise, as "Rome by her very nature has a particular intoxication that wipes out memory." Regarding Rome, Calligarich renders his protagonist's ambivalence brilliantly: "There can be no half measures with her, either she's the love of your life or you have to leave her." Awash in a sea of unmeaning, Leo keeps his mooring though a few authentic connections: an abiding love of the ocean, a passion for secondhand books, his mercurial lover Arianna and a friendship with kindred spirit Graziano.
A gorgeous introduction by André Aciman (Call Me by Your Name; Find Me) provides valuable cultural and biographical context for the novel and its author, as well as the careful work performed by translator Howard Curtis. Leo's repeated remarks that he is "at the end of [his] tether," for example, subtly hint at the existential despair threatening to overtake him.
With even the original Italian only sporadically in print since publication, this translation of Calligarich's novel is a literary jewel to be treasured. --Theo Henderson, bookseller at Ravenna Third Place Books in Seattle, Wash.