The Sun Also Also Rises
On Gianfranco Calligarich's "Last Summer in the City" (translated by Howard Curtis)
It was hot last week – maybe you noticed? If I’m hot one place, I’d rather be anywhere else, even if it’s hot there too, so I decided to read about a Roman summer. Those Italians sweating away in Rome are free to read about New York if they want to imagine sweating somewhere else, we’ll call it a cultural exchange. House of Mirth has a great August in New York scene (anyone who’s anyone is gone), and there’s always the “queer, sultry summer” of The Bell Jar to fall back on. For me, it’s la not-so-dolce vita with Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City. Calligarich’s novel has a strange publishing history; the book was passed over by editors until Natalia Ginzburg herself pulled it off the slush pile and got it published by Garzanti (who had initially passed on it) in 1973. The book was an immediate (if minor) Italian hit, but, for reasons unclear (or at least unspoken by Andre Aciman in his introduction), went quickly out of print, its flame only being kept alive by a cult of booksellers and literati. Forty years later, a small Italian publishing house reissued it, with another wave of acclaim coming through, but then somehow it went out of print again, only to be finally re-re-issued in 2016, for good this time. (I think.) Call it the Italian version of Stoner: the ‘perfect novel’ that no one buys, until they haven’t bought it for so long that now they have to buy it. Howard Curtis’s translation made it stateside in 2021; four years later, it’s still available, so I guess we’re safe, but maybe grab a copy now just in case. Last Summer in the City is a great book, a great portrait of existential malaise and an even better one of just how good it feels to be unemployed, especially in Rome, but also having to face that one can’t be unemployed forever, and whether one can live with that. Or, in fewer words: what it’s like to face down thirty.
Last Summer in the City is its own thing, but its spiritual cousins aren’t hard to see. There’s a bit of Oblomov in here, some of A Hero of Our Time, a little My Face For the World to See, some Fellini, some Holden Caulfield (grown up), a little Fitzgerald, a little Conrad, and a little Hemingway. You write about a lost generation, you tip your cap to The Sun Also Rises. Our hero Leo Gazzara is a Milanese ne’er do-well living in Rome; he transcribes sports dispatches for cash but otherwise drinks away his days (or tries to dry out), reads, picks up women, goes to the beach, or catches a flick. (Midday movie, can’t beat it, Don Draper knew that.) A couple of his friends have skipped town – Leo makes a pass at the wife before they go, rake that he is – so he’s got a place for himself rather than a shabby hotel room, and they sold him their old Alfa Romeo to boot. An apartment overlooking the city, some wheels, what else do you need? Quite a bit, it turns out, no matter how much Leo tries to pretend otherwise.
When you’re melting somewhere else, Rome seems pretty nice, but its inhabitants feel a whole ‘nother kind of way, like the eternal city is an eternal grind, a love-hate relationship that any big city inspires. Familiarity breeds contempt, but it’s tough to give it up:
Rome was our city, she tolerated us, flattered us, and even I ended up realizing that in spite of the sporadic work, the weeks when I went hungry, the damp, dark hotel rooms with their yellowing furniture squeaking as if killed and desiccated by some obscure liver disease, I couldn’t live anywhere else {…] If she’s loved, she’ll give herself to you whichever way you want her, all you need to do is go with the flow and you’ll be within reach of the happiness you deserve. You’ll have summer evenings glittering with lights, vibrant spring morning, café tablecloths ruffled by the wind like girls’ skirts, keen winters, and endless autumns, when she’ll seem vulnerable, sick, weary, swollen with shredded leaves that are silent underfoot. You’ll have dazzling white steps, noisy fountains, ruined temples, and the nocturnal silence of the dispossessed, until time loses all meaning, apart from the banal aim of keeping the clock hands turning. In this way you too, waiting day after day, will become part of her. You too will nourish the city. Until one sunny day, sniffing the wind from the sea and looking up at the sky, you’ll realize there’s nothing left to wait for.
Leo has a couple common refrains: he’s tired, he’s got to get the hell out, he’s at the end of his tether, and all he can get is leftovers, so much so that he starts to feel like a leftover himself. One of his buddies, Graziano, compares their kind to the Last of the Mohicans, the last of a dying breed. Everywhere around them are starch-collared working drones, career men, people with actual ambition… but what kind of life is that? “All good people,” Leo ponders to himself at one point, “but what did I have in common with them?” Leo finds another leftover counterpart in Ariana, a woman just back from an institution, who he meets at a party and then spends many fruitless nights with. She’s obsessed with Proust, so who better to wax about an imagined past with?
“There must be some advantage in being rich,” I said, but she was miles away, swaying meditatively on the cobblestones of the courtyard in time to her chewing of the madeleine. “Are you looking for a loose paving stone?” I asked.
My display of Proustian culture impressed her. “There’d be no point,” she said, looking at me, her curiosity aroused. “Madeleines aren’t the way they used to be.”
“Nothing’s the way it used to be.”
“That’s a good beginning,” she said. “Go on.”
“Well,” I said, “that’s it, really. We’re living in quite depressing times, but what can we do about it? We have no choice.”
“No,” she said, holding back a smile, “no choice at all. Have you ever thought how many pleasures progress has deprived us of?”
Their lovers’ dialogue continues; he would’ve liked to have born “In Vienna before the end of the empire,” she “in Combray,” and they go to the Capitoline hill and look over deserted squares by the Forum, and, in a perfect pathetic fallacy, “the basilicas, frozen in marble, were dreaming of the day they would thaw.” Everything has a strange feeling of suspension, something past its sell-by date but still hanging on, nothing the way it used to be, an easy feeling to slip into when you’re surrounded by ruins of ancient grandeur. (Again, turning thirty, that long hangover of your youth still hanging around.) Leo and Ariana both have what we’d now call ‘avoidant attachment styles,’ and so they push and pull away from one another, never admitting their real feelings – or denying them, as Ariana rebuffs his proclamation of love with a simple “never say that again,” and later on he returns the favor – and, fittingly, never become anything, just something that coulda been. (The Sun Also Rises here, in that Leo’s, ahem, member, doesn’t cooperate in this relationship, making it perfectly unregenerative.)
Graziano is the useless third wheel on the bike that the novel sets up between Leo and Ariana, though he’s fun enough company: “He was what you’d call a serious drinker. I’d once seen him lift a beer to his lips and pour it down the collar of his shirt.” He’s got a wife and kids, but still runs away from responsibility (and from his own unwilling member; impotence is contagious among slackers, it seems, though all the booze doesn’t help.) At one point, Leo sees him at home with his kids, but Graziano just isn’t made for it:
Sitting on the Ping-Pong table, the two twins, who were also still up, watched us in silence, chewing gum. Graziano noticed them and started saying, “What are you two still doing up?” but saying it in every possible tone – soft, paternal, worried, irritated, imperious. He was like an actor trying out a difficult line.
Amid a number of feints at professionalism – a plum job at a TV studio for one that he can’t even hold for a day – Leo reverts back to the wild life with Graziano, working on a certainly doomed avant-garde film script with him and trying not to get too drunk too early to actually complete it. Ariana ducks in on these sessions, and they make up a little fucked up kind of three amigos, Graziano shamelessly flirting with her and Leo pretending he’s not crazy about her. (“‘You love me.’ ‘No,’ I said again, feeling as if for the rest of my life the only thing I’d be able to say was no.”) There’s something kind of sweet about their little merry band, but it’s a bittersweet kind of hopelessness. It doesn’t last; of course it can’t last. Like Leo says early on in the novel, “we are what we are not because of the people we’ve met but because of those we left.” Or, near the end: “It’s always like that… It’s the best ones who leave.”
The pleasure of Calligarich’s novel is not only tooling around Rome with some terminally well-read bohemians (though that’s a lot of it); it’s in Leo’s narratorial voice, at once wise and also naive (thirty isn’t that old at all!), wounded yet defiant, world-weary and self-destructive while still open to wonder and delight. It takes a special eye to make Rome feel new again, or to even enlighten another shabby corner of it, but Calligarich found the perfect disaffected vessel with which to explore a kind of essential human loneliness, an estrangement from the world at large. It might be that feeling – combined with an all-time stinger of an ending – that kept the book flitting in and out of publication, because it’s necessarily hard to find too many people who feel the same way. But the essential problem of modernity – this specific body in this specific world in this time – just finds a way, no matter how many years it takes to stick. It will surely only get hotter this summer, and it will surely only get hotter every year from here on, so at the very least you’ve got plenty of opportunities to suffer through it with a companion as good as Last Summer in the City.
For now, you can get Last Summer in the City at your local bookstore or local library. If you have to buy online, Bookshop.org supports bookstores across the country.
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