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Last Summer in the City, by Gianfranco Calligarich

Wednesday 15 September, 6pm

The author of the book’s foreword André Aciman will be in conversation with the translator Howard Curtis. 

Chaired by Claire Armitstead and introduced by an interview to Gianfranco Calligarich by Howard Curtis (15’, in Italian with English subtitles).

The acclaimed first novel by award-winning author Gianfranco Calligarich, first published in Italy by Garzanti in 1973 and now out in English with Pan Macmillan (Farrar, Straus and Giroux in the US) in a translation by Howard Curtis, is a newly rediscovered cult classic of Italian literature. Intense, brief, witty and devastating, this is the story of drifter Leo, as he falls intensely in love with young Arianna in Rome.

In the late 1960s, Leo Gazzara left his family in Milan and moved to Rome for work. Soon unemployed, he has spent his time in an alcoholic haze, bouncing between hotels, bars, romantic entanglements, and the homes of his rich and well-educated friends. Rome is indifferent. Leo drifts, aimless and alone.
On the evening of his thirtieth birthday, he meets Arianna, a young woman who is both fragile and seductive. All night they drive the city in Leo’s run-down Alfa Romeo, talking and talking. They eat brioche for breakfast, drink through the dawn, drive to the sea and back. A whirlwind beginning. This is the story of the year Leo fell in love and lost everything.


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André Aciman
is an Italian-American writer. Born and raised in Alexandria, Egypt, he is currently distinguished professor at the Graduate Center of City University of New York, where he teaches the history of literary theory and the works of Marcel Proust. He is the author of several novels, including Call Me by Your Name (winner of the Lambda Literary Award and made into a film directed by Luca Guadagnino), Eight White Nights and the memoir Out of Egypt (which won a Whiting Award).

Howard Curtis has translated more than a hundred books, mostly fiction, from Italian, French and Spanish. Among the Italian writers he has translated are Luigi Pirandello, Beppe Fenoglio, Leonardo Sciascia, Giorgio Scerbanenco, Gianrico Carofiglio, Pietro Grossi, Filippo Bologna, Fabio Geda, Andrej Longo, Paolo Sorrentino, Marco Malvaldi, Matteo Righetto and Gianfranco Calligarich.

Claire Armitstead is is associate editor, culture for the Guardian. She presents the weekly Guardian books podcast and is a regular commentator on radio, and at live events across the UK and internationally. She edited Tales of Two Londons: Stories From a Fractured City (O/R Books, 2018), an anthology that sets out to mirror London’s diversity with contributions including memoir, reportage, history and other genres.

Gianfranco Calligarich was born in Asmara, Eritrea, and grew up in Milan, then moved to Rome, where he worked as a journalist and screenwriter. He wrote many successful TV shows for Rai, the national public broadcasting company of Italy, and founded the Teatro XX Secolo in 1994. He is the author of many novels, including La malinconia dei Crusich, which won the Viareggio-Rèpaci Prize. Last Summer in the City is the first of his novels to be translated into English.

 

  • Organizzato da: ICI London