Separate Rooms
Pier Vittorio Tondelli's masterpiece is a meditation on life, death, love, writing, belonging, desire, oneness, solitude, language, sexuality, silence, religion, and so much more
Tonight at 6pm CEST (that’s Italy time) we will gather online to discuss Separate Rooms, a novel by Pier Vittorio Tondelli (translated by Simon Pleasance and with an introduction by André Aciman). The Zoom link is here.
Published in 1989, the book follows thirty-something Leo across Europe and North America on a journey from room to room—both physical and metaphysical—as he attempts to find meaning in the death (and life) of his young lover, Thomas. Past and present, reality and unreality all slot together in Leo’s creation of a theory to explain his solitude and his separateness—a theory that will ultimately find its conclusion in the written word itself:
For they were two small, finite entities, Leo and Thomas, who would soon vanish from the world along with all their friends and all the people they had ever known, and then they would turn back into nothing more than a handful of dry, crumbling bones. They were searching for the right words to talk of all this, and this force of and stress of writing, which had something to do with music and lamentation and devoutness, was the only moment when they could see themselves attached to other people, when their circumscribed life could attain the boundaries of the epic.
The novel is so achingly beautiful and all-encompassing and devastating that my co-host Lauren and I have already resigned ourselves to the fact that we may simply become mute in the face of a discussion about it. If you have read it, or are intrigued to learn more about this modern Italian masterpiece, please do join us tonight.
