Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo

Published in Italy in 2022; published in translation by Grove Press, Black Cat on June 27, 2023

Dysfunctional families can be charming, at least in Rome. As children, Verika and her more intelligent brother were rarely allowed to interact with a world that their protective parents regarded as far too dangerous. They devised meaningless games to escape boredom, games at which Verika invariably but pointlessly cheated. From this, Verika learned a life lesson. “Whenever I feel like I’m trapped in a room, in a game with rules, rather than try to escape from it I try to taint the logic of the room, of the rules.” She invents her own reality. Perhaps this reality invention makes Verika an unreliable narrator as she tells the reader her life story.

Both parents are strange. Verika’s father often says, “We have reached the height of paradox.” He loves to build walls, not just metaphorically. He has created multiple small rooms in their small apartment, cutting windows in half and making the bidet inaccessible. He wraps Verika in paper towels as a protection against perspiration, which he regards as the source of dangerous illnesses. Verika smells bad because her father thinks a good scrub with paper towels and alcohol is preferable to bathing.

Verika’s mother is convinced that her children are in danger and bombards them with calls when they are not in her presence. When Verika enters the world to attend school, her mother or father drives her or her brother walks with her, but their protectiveness cannot shelter her from the experience of life. Verika’s mother is horrified when Verika learns about the male appendage from a flasher who was lurking outside the school. When her mother tells her teacher “the girl believes she’s seen a wiener,” her classmates pass her sketches “that looked nothing at all like my vision of the reddish protuberance, which turned out to be reassuring.”

Yet for all their protectiveness, Verika’s parents are willing to let her visit a grandfather and sleep in his bed well beyond the age when a girl should be sharing a bed with an adult male relative. It isn’t clear that anything inappropriate happens, but it also isn’t clear whether Verika would recognize any activity as inappropriate, given her limited frame of reference.

Verika loses her fear of wieners when she learns that a girl can hold one in her hand (she finds one unexpectedly in her grasp while riding on a crowded tram and politely returns it to its owner). When she reaches her late teens, Verika has more experience with wieners but is less certain whether the things she’s done with them constitute sex. Those things seem to have been consensual, but Verika is lost in a world of her own, making it difficult to know whether she is suppressing the truth.

Lost on Me is Verika’s look back at her life. Verika tells her story factually (although not linearly), leaving it to the reader to deduce how the strange way in which was raised might have had an impact on her present. For the most part, Verika’s memories are amusing. To the extent they might be disturbing, Verika simply chooses not to be troubled by them. Her discussion of an abortion, for example, is unemotional. It’s just another thing that happened in her life.

As a young adult, Verika makes a number of discoveries in rapid order — about touch, about sex, about infidelity, about Berlin — although her narrative cuts those events into slices that she serves out of order. She is later astonished to learn how men can be so generous while asking so little in return — asking, that is, for something that means so little to her. She has boyfriends but she isn’t relationship material. She travels to Mexico with a female friend (where she is inevitably bombarded by calls from her mother) and later considers (without emotion) how that friendship just drifted away. The friend is easily replaced by Amory Blain, the main character in This Side of Paradise.

In the present, Verika and her brother are authors. Verika writes books when she’s staying with people in Berlin. Lost on Me is her latest. Because Verika is honest about her dishonesty, it is difficult to know when her narrative is meant to be reliable or even whether that matters. She describes a 14-year relationship with A, yet none of her friends seem aware of A’s existence, perhaps because A changes bodies. Is he any more real than Amory Blain? Verika’s mother sends texts to A on his own phone, so it’s hard to know. Maybe Verika is lying about the phone.

Verika describes her father’s death, her mother’s loneliness (reported in telephone calls ten times a day), her dismal efforts to conquer insomnia with pills and masturbation. She claims a fear of physical contact yet feels a need to watch others touching each other. She tells people vague stories about friends unseen for the last two years who have two-year old children. Two years seems a sensible distance and age when she has no clue about the true number.

One of the novel’s most interesting themes is the malleability of memory. Verika is untrustworthy not just because she tells deliberate lies but because her memories are hazy. They “change in the process of forming.” That’s true of all memory. Two witnesses will remember the same event in very different ways because that’s how memory works (or doesn’t work). Lost on Me is impressive in its honesty, even if the reader might not know what to believe, because Verika understands more than most of us that having a memory doesn’t mean the memory is true.

Identity (more precisely, Verika’s lack of identity) is another key theme. Verika claims she is regularly mistaken for a male, perhaps because she often wears male clothing. She is convinced that others do not recognize her, but perhaps they are strangers who have never seen her before. Even her grandfather always photographed her facing away from the camera, taking pictures of a back that could belong to anyone. At times, her mother sees someone else in a photo and believes it to be Verika. She has felt, at every moment of her life: “Oh whatever. Let’s just say this is me.”

The “fullest expression” of Verika’s identity is the manipulation of truth “as though it were an exercise in style.” She claims to keep a “glimmer of truth” inside her but confesses that she often forgets it or conflates it with the lie.

Lost on Me, with its ambiguous truths and confusions of reality, comes across as an exercise in style. While it seems to be narrated as a stream of consciousness, its loose structure belies its careful construction. Veronica Raimo ends the novel by confessing that she writes “things that are ambiguous, frustrating.” She also says she’s “fine with that.” Readers who are not fine with ambiguity should probably look for a more concrete story. While Lost on Me can be frustrating, it is also an intriguing exploration of the often illusory distinction between truth and fantasy.

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The Patron Saint of Second Chances by Christine Simon

Published by Atria Books on April 12, 2022

Readers might find themselves yearning for a book that distracts them from the muddy reality of modern life, the kind of book in which a happy ending, however unlikely, is guaranteed. The Patron Saint of Second Chances is a charming story of the old world’s stubborn resistance to the new world’s encroachment. Eccentric characters populate Prometto, Italy, a sleepy village of 212 residents. Prometto is fortunate in that one of its residents leaves or dies when a new child is born, saving it the trouble of amending the population statistic on the village sign.

Giovannino Speranza is the mayor of Prometto. His wife inherited a hotel and he inherited his father’s vacuum cleaner repair business. The hotel has no guests because nobody has any reason to visit Prometto. A steady customer who regularly vacuums up Legos keeps Speranza in business.

Speranza is anguished by the apparent inevitability of the village’s demise, as the water authorities have given the village two months to replace its pipes (currently patched with bubble gum) before its water supply is shut off. Villagers are behind on their taxes and the village only has 200 euros, well short of the 70,000 required to make the repairs. The water authority will not authorize a payment plan because it is clear that Prometto will never have money.

Speranza is inspired after learning that a property owner in another village elevated local property values by spreading the rumor that George Clooney was about to buy a villa. The village economy went wild. Speranza attempts his own version of the scam by dropping the name of Dante Rinaldi, an Italian actor he’d never heard of until his adorning daughter talked about him. A rumor takes hold that the actor will be filming a movie in Prometto. Speranza only needs to find an investor to fund the movie and then divert the investment to pipe repairs. The fact that towns do not produce movies never occurs to Prometto’s residents, who have no experience in such things. Nor would they care, given the life that the rumor breathes into their dying village.

The village’s only wealthy resident, a butcher named Maestro, agrees to make a large investment in the movie, but only if one of his many sons will appear in the film. Speranza sees no choice but to simulate the filming of a movie to satisfy the investor.  One setback follows another as Speranza collects and loses money, always ending up short of the 70,000 the village needs to continue its existence. At some point, Speranza must confess to the village priest, who not only forgives Speranza but joins the scheme to save the village.

The Patron Saint of Second Chances is quirky, silly, and very funny. The story follows its own mad logic, making it easy to suspend disbelief in the unlikely plot. Speranza makes an enemy of Maestro, who keeps a wary eye on his investment, making a romance between Maestro’s son and Speranza’s daughter a Romeo and Juliet story. Another love story involves Smilzo, the only character who knows anything about making movies, and the woman he worships, who thinks she is playing the female lead and eagerly awaits the promised appearance of Rinaldi. An ongoing joke involving the world’s largest Pomeranian and the miniature schnauzers who harass him blends with another ongoing joke about real and simulated flatulence. What more could a reader ask from a comedy? The Patron Saint of Second Chances is just about perfect for readers who need an escape from the relentless crush of bad news.

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The Women I Love by Francesco Pacifico

Published in Italy in 2018; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on December 7, 2021

Through Marcello, the narrator of The Women I Love, Francesco Pacifico tells us that the novel is an “experiment in how to talk about women.” Talking about women might be easier than talking to them, a skill Marcello has not mastered. He mansplains, even to the extent of telling women what they are feeling. He is more in touch with his own feelings than the feelings of the women he loves, but Marcello’s feelings are difficult to understand. For no obvious reason, he tells us that he has lost “every feeling, every certainty that went into the experience of loving and being loved.” Marcello’s drama stems from jealousy, a strange reaction in light of the ease with which Marcello betrays Barbara, the woman he marries during the course of the novel. The Women I Love has been described as a parody of toxic masculinity in literature, and perhaps toxic is the best way to characterize Marcello’s experiment. Fortunately, the toxin is amusingly weak, much like Marcello.

Marcello is a poet turned editor. Marcello lives with Barbara in Rome and, early in the novel, is splitting his work life between the Milan and Rome offices of his employer. He begins his story with Eleonora, a lover he apparently took in the belief that having a girlfriend on the side is a duty of Italian men. Marcello tells Eleonora that their relationship is based on an excess of passion, not on anything that could be the foundation of a marriage. Still, Marcello seems surprised (or at least distressed) when Eleonora decides it is time to move on. Having convinced himself that Eleonora used him to get her editing job, Marcello naturally believes that Eleonora slept with the boss to get more prestigious editing assignments than Marcello is receiving. In reality, Eleonora simply cares about the content of books more than Marcello, whose is more concerned with promoting books than improving them.

Marcello tells us that Eleonora is the only one of his loves he doesn’t understand. It seems clear, however, that Marcello has made little effort to understood any of the women in his life. Even as Marcello describes the women in his memories, he wonders whether he understands women well enough to write about them. He addresses the male perception that women are incomprehensible by referring to writers like Philip Roth: “In these great males novels, men are restless, they make mistakes, they struggle, and the novel is a pinball machine where the women are bumpers that ring and light up when touched — they’re so striking, so crucial, that they seem like main characters, but they’re really only a function of the man’s little steel ball.”

When he thinks about women, Marcello wonders if he is only rating them from one to ten, judging them as if he were at a cow auction. No reader will accuse Marcello of being woke when it comes to women, although he might deserve credit for recognizing the superficiality of his interactions with them. As a writer, he claims to be making an effort to give them a serious role, to portray them as something more than background characters who support or condemn men. He wants to feel “truly attached to them and stop feeling that they’re only floating shadows.” That is a worthy goal for a writer even if Pacifico addresses it in parody.

Each chapter in The Women I Love is devoted to one of Marcello’s loves. At varying times in his life, Marcello’s thoughts of Eleonora and Barbara are passionate. His relationships with his sister, his mother, and his sister-in-law are platonic, although he’s certain that all men view their brothers’ wives as sex objects (a belief that, in my experience, is not remotely true). He also objectifies a friend’s live-in girlfriend, a woman who occasionally sleeps with his sister. Marcello feels like an idiot for taking so long to realize that his sister is a lesbian, a symptom of his failure to pay much attention to women at all unless he wants to screw them. Marcello gives us biographical details of his mother but then admits he doesn’t know her: “my language is muddled, imprecise — it’s all hearsay.” Although she doesn’t get her own chapter, Marcello’s grandmother also receives some love.

Marcello tells the reader that The Women I Love is “a novel of my memories.” True to its post-modernist form, Marcello speaks directly to the reader, occasionally explaining his textual revisions and stylistic choices, his decision to conceal certain names or details to avoid disturbing friendships after publication (“the enzyme of fiction allows for this: first confess, then conceal”). Sometimes he questions the inaccuracy of his memory; other times he discusses Italian literature.

The Women I Love has nothing approaching a plot, although it does follow Marcello through his late 30s as he gets married, separates, repeatedly changes jobs and his residence, and makes a wrong-footed attempt to rekindle a relationship with Eleonora, perhaps committing a sexual assault by refusing to acknowedge the word "stop." The novel ends abruptly, Marcello apparently having exhausted his observations of the women he loves. The reader might regard some of those observations as insightful. Other observations might just be intended to shock. Marcello rejects the common view that relationship success requires hard work. “What a bourgeois crock of shit,” he writes, “the couple as a business venture, where every day you roll up the shutter door, then roll up your sleeves.” Marcello also rejects the idea of women saving men because, in novels written by men, “a woman who saves someone is a woman who winds up punished on the following page; the role of savior that men apply to woman in some narrative form is our wooden horse, concealing our desire to penetrate and destroy.” The value of The Women I Love is its ability to provoke thoughts or conversation about nuggets like these, regardless of whether the reader ultimately agrees with or lampoons Marcello’s conclusions. For that reason, the novel might be a good book club selection, particularly if the book club has both male and female participants.

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Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich

First published in Italy in 1973; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on August 10, 2021

Last Summer in the City was rejected by several publishers before it found a home and earned excellent reviews in the Italian press. Then it dropped out of sight until it was republished in Italy in 2016. It’s easy to understand why so many publishers initially rejected it. The first half tells a story that seems mundane. I’m guessing editors stopped reading and moved on to the next submission before they understood the book’s value. By the second half, the story gains significance from the cumulative weight of small events. The ending is something of a shock.

Last Summer in the City tells the story of a 29-year-old man who, finally realizing that he needs to be an adult, understands that he isn’t equipped for adulthood. Leo Gazzara narrates an empty year in his life. Leo is in Rome. He reads constantly and tries without success to write fiction. He scrapes by without a job, moving from hotel to hotel until he arranges to stay in the apartment of a couple who will be working in Mexico. He moves from woman to woman until he meets Arianna, an infuriating woman with whom he falls in love. Arianna entices him and pushes him away, always appearing to want the opposite of whatever Leo wants.

Leo drinks away raucous evenings with his friend Graziano, following a lifestyle that seems likely to doom them both. Graziano drinks even more than Leo, can’t satisfy his wealthy wife, and like all men, has a crush on Arianna. Leo and Graziano set out to write a screenplay about a man who kills his father, thinking that Graziano’s wife will finance the film. The only virtue of their plan is that they drink a bit less while they’re writing.

Leo eventually finds and loses a job before taking a position at a newspaper, transcribing stories without doing any reporting of his own, earning Arianna’s disappointment and adding to his own sense of frustration about a life that seems to be going nowhere. Arianna’s continued flirtation and occasional declarations of love only add to Leo’s gloom, coupled with the knowledge that Arianna is sleeping with a wealthy but untalented painter.

As a writer, Leo comments frequently upon writers. As an avid reader, he also comments upon readers, quoting Borges’ remark that good readers are even more rare than good writers. I was more taken by Leo’s observation that a reader’s perception of a book depends upon the reader’s mood during the reading process — a mood that is external to the act of reading and influenced by current experience. “A book that struck you as banal on a first reading may dazzle you on a second simply because in the meantime you suffered some kind of heartbreak, or you took a journey, or you fell in love.”

Leo has a love/hate relationship with Rome. “She’s not so much a city as a wild beast hidden in some secret part of you. There can be no half measures with her, either she’s the love of your life or you have to leave her, because that’s what the tender beast demands, to be loved.” The same description might apply to Arianna.

None of the characters in Last Summer in the City are happy. The novel might signal that we live in an unhappy world, that nothing can make us happy because the things we desire are all superficial, that we are alone “in the middle of this vast, terrible world” with no idea how to give our lives meaning. These are not happy thoughts, but they set up a surprising ending that in retrospect seems inevitable given the gloom that precedes it.

As it nears the end, Last Summer in the City seems like a belated coming-of-age novel, the story of a man entering the middle stage of life who is accepting the challenge to find a purpose. It is, at least, the story of a man who finds the courage to make a decision about his future. The book is depressing and might not appeal to readers who want books to be upbeat and life-affirming. Not all people view life from an optimistic perspective. Last Summer in the City illustrates how an intelligent individual might come to embrace a view of life that most people reject. Gianfranco Calligarich’s ability to put the reader inside the head of such a person explains the novel’s literary value, while the depressing tone explains why the story did not earn lasting popularity after its initial publication.

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Kill the Father by Sandrone Dazieri

First published in Italy in 2014; published in translation by Scribner on January 10, 2017

Kill the Father introduces two notable characters: Deputy Captain Colomba Caselli and Dante Torre. Both are finding ways to cope with traumatic pasts. They support each other after being thrown together in the search for a serial killer.

Caselli is on leave, recovering from a near-death experience that she secretly refers to as “the Disaster,” but she reluctantly agrees to join an investigation of a missing child, her last official act before submitting her resignation. Her boss wants her to investigate because somebody needs to step on the toes of bureaucrats, and Caselli has nothing to lose, given her plan to retire.

Torre has a talent for determining whether children who make accusations of sexual assault are merely repeating what they’ve been conditioned to believe by the other parent. He earns a living by selling that talent to lawyers. Dante is also an expert on missing persons. He was a kidnapping victim as a child and only gained his freedom after eleven years of captivity. Colomba turns to Torre for help locating the missing child.

Dante is one of the more interesting characters to appear in recent crime fiction. He’s claustrophobic and neurotic, but his quirks are a natural consequence of his horrendous childhood. Dante has developed an expertise at reading people (a more credible expertise than FBI profilers display in any number of bad crime novels), but he only wants to do so from a distance because he has a palpable aversion to emotional displays.

Colomba has issues of her own, stemming from the Disaster that she explains at the novel’s midway point. Colomba has lost her self-confidence and worries that she will make another bad decision that will result in more deaths. Some of her fellow police detectives think she’s come unhinged, which adds to her intrigue. And again, Sandrone Dazieri doesn’t overplay Colomba’s emotional fragility, as do so many modern thriller writers who imbue their protagonists with psychiatric quirks.

The plot is filled with surprises, most of which arrive just after it seems that the story has drawn to a close. I wondered what would fill the last 50 pages. None of the revelations were expected, but none are contrived. They all make sense in light of the previous events. The final pages build tension nicely. The deft plotting and the strong characters make Kill the Father one of the better Italian crime novels I’ve encountered.

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