haxxunne 's review for:

Separate Rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli

4.5

emotional hopeful inspiring reflective sad slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: Complicated

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A geography of gay intimacy

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Out of print in this translation for a while, this republished novel is a canonical text that explores the geography of gay intimacy, a shape of love that is not heteronormative, that isn’t homonormative, or ‘normal’, whatever that means. An Italian writer Leo is facing—or rather, not facing—the death of his lover Thomas, a young German musician. As Leo travels from city to city, recreating the distance that he demanded of Thomas in their relationship while he was alive, memories of Thomas spark chains of recollections, and moments and visions and people appear and merge and vanish as Leo finally approaches the heart of what troubles him, what has always troubled him.

It would be easy to see this as an elegiac novel, presaging the author’s own death not long after it was first published, but it is in fact a careful dissection and remaking of a survivor who must find a conscious reason to live after his lover has gone. Leo rejects heteronormativity but also homonormativity, the dark reflection of straight relationships; however, in so doing Leo almost completely rejects humanity. It is only in realising that Leo’s time with Thomas changed him irrevocably and for the better that Leo finds hope to carry on and to find love again. It bears comparison to Charlie Porter’s Nova Scotia House, with the elements remixed and remade, and both can take their place in the canon of gay literary fiction.