The Higher You Go, the More You See

The Last Summer in the City: A Novel, by Gianfranco Calligarich, translated by Howard Curtis.

Spoiler Alert!

This was a hard read.  It took discipline to keep reading and courage to finish.  At first, I didn't understand where the story was taking me.  It felt so bleak and frenetic but aimless.  All this coming and going and ending up nowhere; in other people's living rooms, other people's conversations, other people's beds.  All show and nothing to show for it.  Does that even make sense?

But I kept going and somewhere in the night, I began to get the sense of things.   Words began to reveal their true meaning and that's when I understood why it was so hard - I knew where Calligarich was taking me and like the protagonist, I didn't think I wanted to go.   

Scintillating in its original Italian, the translator Howard Curtis, who deserves much recognition with his successful translation, grasps the complexity of this brilliant narrative, "Nobody to whom a thing like that happens can return home exactly as before."   It's the first clue that this narrative isn't going to end well.   

Curtis not only translates the narrative in perfect syntax, but he also captures the very essence of what Calligarich is laying out for the reader: that, "We are what we are, not because of the people we've met but because of those we've left behind."  It's in that sentence I finally understand what I am reading.  It's the family left behind in Milan, it's discovering that Rome is, "Not so much a city as a wild beast hidden in some secret part of you; it's the death of Graziano; and it's the realization that, Arianna, "Could only belong to me when she was someone else's.  When she too was a leftover."

The ending is inevitable at this point.  But I didn't blink.  I drove with him on the road south, to the coast.  I helped him pack his books and I followed him into the sea.  "The sea that welcomes everything, all the things that have never succeeded in being born and those that have died forever."  Because the truth is  sometimes we die of old age, but more often we flame out well before our "sell by" date.  Sometimes, we are lucky enough to know that, "Every minute passed was one less minute I had to live," and to have the courage to take life, and death, into our own hands.  

It's a dark, dark tale.  But as the protagonists moves towards his ends, he find himself whole and healed, because, "The higher you go, the better you can see things."