Reviews - El último verano en Roma

El último verano en Roma by Gianfranco Calligarich

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It’s about Rome and how to love and nourish the city and what it will demand (but also give). It’s about how the things and people we leave make us who we are. It’s about how Leo, the narrator, slowly ruins his life in a little corner of a city and about impotent men struggling with middle age, trying to find their place in the world whether through their jobs or through their relationships. It’s about struggles with staying sober and finding ways to make meaning out of chaos.

Infused with light angst (but not dread) and light beauty, there’s a momentum to the writing, of one slight misstep after another towards something unknown and unknowable, similar to how Leo and Arianna both injured in different ways, not knowing what they want from the world, hurtle themselves around one another.

Largely pedestrian in scope (and at points mundane), the story rolls along until Leo’s friend (and drunk) Graziano commits suicide, forcing Leo to handle his affairs (the scene with him lying down next to his corpse in the morgue is so gentle). This death plants a seed (“I was at the end of my tether…” is a refrain hinting at its inevitable end) and subsequently opens Leo to being used, again, by Arianna, a dynamic that both seem to accept. After which Leo begins drinking heavily, ends up fighting a cop and goes to jail. Upon release he is sentimental and goes home to Milan to visit his family but can’t face them.

The experience of reading Last Summer in the City is like feeling a cool breeze at the end of summer. It’s a gentle sign of the changing of things, the continuation of life, uncaring of what has come before. It’s the soft kind of heartbreak of knowing that life and love have passed you by.