Emily Warner (she/her) rediscovers the beautiful world of Calligarich and his characters, adrift in the hazy city of Rome.
https://nouse.co.uk/2022/12/11/last-summer-in-the-city-a-forgotten-masterpiece-of-italian-literature
Image Credit: Image by Javon Swaby
Rome, in this novel, is a place of forgotten souls. A city where the ashes of people’s lives, blown across Italy, finally come to rest. Every character meanders across the pages, despite an acute awareness that “every minute that passed was one less minute [...] to live”, and reading the book is like entering that same suspension of time. Captivating from beginning to end, Gianfranco Calligarich’s novel spins a beautiful, delicate web of memories and possibilities. This is a novel about words unspoken, experiences unlived and potential unfulfilled. It is about sex not had, and love never acknowledged. It gestures to ‘last summer’, an ambiguous past, and also describes an end; the ‘last summer’. For years this masterpiece of Italian literature has wavered in and out of the public eye, like someone dipping their toe into the sea before deciding it’s too cold. At times garnering great critical acclaim and at others gathering dust on an empty bookshelf, Last Summer is as adrift and elusive as the story it contains.
Fermenting amidst a haze of cigarettes, sex and regret, the novel’s protagonist, Leo Gazzara, can be found propped up against the side of a bar, book in hand. After countless nights spent with strange women, he soaks in the pleasure of a bath and lukewarm coffee before leaving their apartments forever. Evenings are a blur of alcohol-inspired escapades with his friend Graziano, and his days are occupied pursuing a failed career in journalism. Leo seems to scrape by on stolen peanuts from his rich friends' parties and the little cash he has in his pockets. Steadfast through it all is his “old Alfa Romeo”. The car recurs as a reminder that, despite being able to travel somewhere else, Leo is perpetually stuck here amongst the fragments of his broken dreams.
That is, until he meets Arianna; equally lost, devastatingly beautiful, and almost always “hysterical”. Towards the beginning of the novel, they share an evening of picturesque moments, like movie stills from life. Warm brioches at three in the morning, Arianna’s red raincoat, and long conversations about books. These snippets replay like a broken record without ever going anywhere, always circling back to the same sense of incompatibility. Or rather, perfect compatibility, resulting in what Andre Aciman describes as a “terminally destructive” relationship. They are both equally unmoored and unable to articulate the one word that could change everything: love. It is not until the final pages that Arianna finally admits it: “‘God, how I loved you,’ she said hoarsely. ‘How I loved you’”.
Leo and Arianna love each other in the past tense, feeling nostalgic for something they never had. Like everything else in the novel – time, family, friends, dreams – Leo’s only love slips through his fingers like grains of sand on the beach. Everything about them is incongruous. Even their language seems cosmically misaligned:
“‘It’s starting to rain,’ I said. ‘You’re sad,” she said. ‘I can tell you’re sad.’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘How unlucky I am,’ she said.”
The meaning of these phrases eludes the reader, taunting us with unanswered questions and unfinished thoughts. Reading the conversations between Leo and Arianna is like hopping between stepping stones that keep growing further apart, desperately trying to string together a coherence which lingers just outside the pages of the book. It is frustrating and cryptic. It is love; but what does love mean when unspoken? It is the only thing that cannot be fixed in a city where “nothing is irreparable”.
Calligarich’s stunning prose carries the reader on a journey through Rome’s topography, irrevocably bound to the interior world of the characters. Each of them navigates a sepia-tinged world of bars, apartments, hotel rooms and villas which are drenched in the Italian sun. The striking disharmony between lyrical description and colloquial language blends beauty with the harsher realities of life; it gives voice to those bleak feelings which can only be expressed as “fucked-up”. Meanwhile, moments of poetry and music float through the text; the remains of an idealised life.
One of the marginal notes I made while reading says “every moment has a soundtrack” and this whole novel is profoundly interested in musicality. Leo expresses that certain writers “ought to be read aloud”; the rain speaks and “always seems to be asking something”’, and Leo and Arianna lament their unrealised romance while listening “to the old songs of the previous year”. The text, like a song, contains a refrain; “I was at the end of my tether”. Despite this, Leo’s story fills an entire novel and his ‘tether’ is elongated by the sun-baked landscape of summer.
I will conclude this review in the same way Calligarich concludes his novel, with the sea. A constant presence in the novel, the sea is a source of bliss and purification. The rhythm of the waves is a gentle marker of time passing, quietly and slowly, but perpetually. It is also a place of return, the beginning and end of a cycle. Leo “think[s] that everything returns to the sea”, and although every character in this book is a different shade of loneliness, they are all subject to the shift of time and nature. They all experience tides of emotion, rising and falling with the sea. They represent something heartbreaking and beautiful about being lost.