Place: Rome

Melancholic Leftover(s): Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City

It is a timeless work of watching life flow past.

Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich, translated from the Italian by Howard Curtis, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021

Gianfranco Calligarich’s Last Summer in the City tells the deceptively simple story of a young man drifting through life, searching for romance and success amidst the urban swelter. Newly employed at a medical-literary magazine, narrator Leo Gazzara moves from Milan to Rome—only to be fired a year later due to the publication’s imminent bankruptcy. As he bounces around various jobs and other heartless endeavors, brooding resignation and lethargy permeate Leo’s world; his life, utterly devoid of excitement, becomes simply a series of events to be accepted and passed through in their procession. For the most part, he is a drifter—a flâneur without the poetic possibilities of transcendence. Unambitious and apathetic as he might appear to be, however, the story of Leo is nevertheless one of delicate beauty that imparts the prevalent, existential angst that defined a generation of young men amidst the Italy of the 70s.

In the vein of postwar Italian neorealism, Calligarich spends much of the text on bringing texture and illustration to the humble details of everyday life, and the resulting cinematic effect can likely be referred back to the author’s experience as a screenwriter. Leo’s story counteracts the adulation of glamour and happiness in Fascist propaganda, which holds little to no concern for the personal difficulties of everyday life—boredom, failure, or grief. Instead of telling the simple, customary story of a powerful and desirable man amidst a cosmopolitan enchantment, Last Summer in the City presents a marginalized individual’s quotidian, melancholic tale in a provincial setting. The quiet, understated prose emanates an almost diaristic intimacy into the narrator’s mind, providing an avenue to access his inner vacuum of emptiness, and the terrible simplicity of his apathy.

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A Journey of Faith: Shūsaku Endō’s The Samurai In Review

Do you think He is to be found within those garish Cathedrals? He does not dwell there... I think He lives in the wretched homes of these Indians.

The Samurai by Shūsaku Endō, translated from the Japanese by Van C. Gessel, new edition by New Directions, August 2018

The Samurai is Shūsaku Endō’s 1980 historical fiction that won him the prestigious Noma Literary Prize in Japan in the same year. As stated by Endō himself, this novel’s purpose was not meant merely as historical illustration—it is the story of a spiritual journey through suffering and, in some ways, a story of Endō himself. The Samurai has been published in a fresh edition by New Directions, featuring Van C. Gessel’s original English translation.

The Samurai begins in a poor village in the marshlands of northeast Japan at the very beginning of the seventeenth century. Peasants slave in the fields to pay rice taxes to their feudal lords, often unable to keep any to feed themselves. The samurai, Hasekura Rokuemon, looks after the village dutifully and works alongside the peasants in the fields. Based on real historical events, the samurai is commanded by his feudal lord to leave behind his village and set sail to New Spain (now Mexico) as an emissary to establish trade relations. Along with three fellow Japanese envoys, an ambitious, Jesuit-hating, Franciscan missionary named Velasco, and a horde of Japanese merchants looking for profits, the samurai’s voyage takes him across the deserts of New Spain, Madrid, and finally to Rome, at the foot of the Pope. This voyage is modeled after the real historical journey known as the Keichō Embassy (1613-1620). This historic embassy was one of Japan’s last diplomatic outreaches before the Tokugawa shogunate enacted a strict isolation policy known as the Sakoku, which lasted for the next two hundred and twenty years.

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Translation Tuesday: An excerpt from “Something Written” by Emanuele Trevi

For the entire duration of my last meeting with Laura, in her office, the sharp blade of a box cutter quivered a few millimeters from my jugular.

Via Ann Goldstein, also the translator of Elena Ferrante, here is a colorful extract from Emanuele Trevi’s Something Written, winner of the 2012 European Literature Prize and finalist for Italy’s Strega Prize. In a few deftly executed strokes, the literary critic recreates the cutthroat atmosphere presided over by a former boss (aka “Madwoman”), and mulls over what he took out of that period of “extravagant daily persecution”.

Among the many—too many—people who worked for Laura Betti at the Pier Paolo Pasolini Foundation in Rome, all of them endowed with a colorful store of more or less unpleasant memories, I believe that I can boast of, if nothing else, above-average endurance. Not that I was at all spared the extravagant daily persecution that the Madwoman (as I soon took to calling her, in my own mind) felt it her duty to inflict on her subordinates. On the contrary, I was so irredeemably odious to her (there is no more precise word) that I succeeded in plucking all the strings of her protean sadism: from the ceaseless invention of humiliating nicknames to real physical threat. Every time I entered the offices of the foundation, in a dark, massive corner building on Piazza Cavour, not far from Castel Sant’Angelo, I sensed almost physically the animal hostility, the uncontrollable rage that flashed, like the zigzag lightning in a comic book, from behind the lenses of her big square sunglasses. The standard greetings immediately followed. ‘Good morning, little slut, did you finally figure out that it’s time to GIVE HIM YOUR ASS? Or do you think you can still get away with it?!? But you don’t fool ME, you sweet-talking little slut, it takes a lot more than someone like you’—and this first blast of amenities was ended only by the eruption of a laugh that seemed to come from a subterranean cavern, and was made more threatening by the counterpoint of an indescribable sound halfway between a roar and a sob. Very rarely could the avalanche of insults dumped on the unfortunate victim be traced back to meaningful concepts.

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