First published 1973. Picador, paperback, 2022, translated by Howard Curtis, 2021, pp 165 (+13pp afterword by André Aciman), c.55,000 words (main text).
Set largely in Rome, this book is, as much as anything, a love letter to that city in all seasons. It conveys the feeling of a place full of life and yet in decay, one with immense historic depth and yet an elusive present. Poverty is just around the corner from affluence, effluent from elegance, decay and destruction from the race into the future.
Leo Gazzara, the protagonist, is from that lucky generation not forced into war as his parents and grandparents were. He is clever and well connected and yet has that existential trope of being a lost soul, unable to settle or commit to anything: drifting around work, friends, lovers, and even locations. He lives in and out of an alcoholic haze, sponging off friends, letting down those who try to help him, only recognising love when it has already left. He seems to come by enough money to fund his aimless lifestyle with almost no effort and certainly no recognition that he might better himself, and enjoy life more by settling and applying himself. Only once does he really engage in work by writing a film script with an equally adrift friend, and that comes to nothing in the end.
Who doesn’t feel an outsider from time to time? Who hasn’t experienced imposter syndrome? We can all be occasionally indecisive, but Gazzara relishes his weaknesses, revelling in self-pity. In a fascinating afterword, Aciman writes ‘Avanzo in Italian means a leftover, a remnant, the unwanted, discarded remains of someone else’s life or property. In many ways that one word also sums up the essence of Leo’s life.’ The afterword goes on to explain how avanzo is used repeatedly in the text. Perhaps the Italian of the original contains more subtlety of language than this translation, which occasionally uses rather harsh language. The afterword also illuminates something of Calligarich’s cosmopolitan background, perhaps as an explanation for why the main characters seem so disassociated from the world around them.
Women are secondary characters here, picked up, dropped and used or not by the men as the mood takes them. Two of the extracts from the reviews on the back cover talk of ‘love’, but the book does not convey any real sense of love between Garrara and Arianna who drifts in and out of his life and seems as unstable and disoriented as he is. Her personality is left opaque. She is supposed to be studying architecture, but doesn’t, and is trying to read Proust (Swann’s Way), but not making much progress. At one point Leo packs a suitcase with his books and we are given a list of high-brow titles (all DWMs), which presumably signify the intellectual credentials of the character and the author.
Apparently Calligarich had a great deal of difficulty getting this book published, and it has had a very patchy publishing history since. Now it comes across as a bit of a period piece, with echoes of Fellini’s La Doche Vita, released in 1960, which also concerns a journalist wandering the streets of Rome, although for only seven days as supposed to a year in this book. The writing is stylish in this translation and the descriptive passages are evocative of both the city and the nearby coast. However, the story is one for committed existentialists who revel in a bit of ennui, and aren’t we really too good for this world? Others might think the protagonist could use a good shaking, be told to get real and to stop wasting his talents.
© William John Graham, December 2022