It starts off right in the novel In the embrace of the river by Gianfranco Calligarich (1947): ‘Okay. Perhaps it would be useful to first tell me why I had to think back to this story.’ After which the narrator sketches a place, a time, an action with dry-ironic distance in a few pages. Just as it happened in the Italian writer’s 1970 debut, translated two years ago as The last summer in the city, about a failed love in a ragged Rome. What a discovery, thought the Dutch press and readers. The novel, which has now been translated, is set against the same backdrop, but was written half a lifetime later and was published in 2011.
The whole structure of the book is reminiscent of The last summer in the city: So many years later, from a distant coast – on the Riviera, in this case – a man looks back on an unfortunate love affair in the Capital, as Rome is consistently called here. As a spectator, this time, in a bar called De Hervonden Tijd (also in his debut Calligarich was already indebted to Proust), hidden in the alleys around the wide Piazza Navona. There, a taciturn thirty-something wardrobe encounters an enigmatic woman whom it was impossible to look at without immediately realizing that the highest achievable thing you could get from her was the pin she would pierce right through you before placing you in her bed. already overcrowded collector’s showcase’. The narrator leaves no room for doubt: this is going to spiral out of control.
It will be entertaining for sure, with Calligarich’s talent for comical characters and absurd plot twists. But the spontaneity and enthusiasm that made his debut so infectious are hard to find in this novel. The composition is somewhat contrived; there is significant pointing forwards and backwards, each time new ‘players’ present themselves, which complicate matters even further. The narrator earns his living playing cards in the casino and has an appropriate poker metaphor for each development in the story.
Sometimes that works quite nicely, as when in the opening paragraph, with a nod to Tolstoy, he states ‘that – in life as well as at those hopelessly green tables – all victories are alike, while defeats are all different. So if it really has to be, only the defeats are worth remembering.’ But when, after two hundred pages, all the chips have finally been placed and the last card is on the table, the relief that it’s done is overwhelming.
In any case, the narrator uses a strange language. Each character, city and animal is given its own nickname, from ‘The Ligurian Region Capital’ to ‘My Blocked Mate’ and ‘The Aztec Idol’. It must have been quite a job for translator Manon Smits to adequately translate all those terms. There are some nice finds: a coffin is ‘a wooden jacket’, money is ‘what matters’, in the casino are ‘the tables of my livelihood’. Because of the consequence you also get used to that language; in the long run the fixed formulas lose their ludicrousness, they are just words to indicate things. The increasingly erratic punctuation, which the narrator suggests follows his disturbed heart rhythm, is harder to tolerate: ‘That’s something. Comes to mind when you look at the sea.’ And even, on the very last page: ‘On. The. across. From. The. River.’
Calligarich gives the impression that he wanted to put too many ideas into one book. He not only sketches the lightning marriage between two troubled people, but also the history of all the hijackers on the coast. Wants not only to give a picture of Rome in the year of revolution ’68, but also of bourgeois Switzerland, ‘Swinging London’ and messy Barcelona. Have the narrator repeat over and over that he didn’t learn some details from the story until years later, and exactly how.
Fortunately, there is still much to enjoy, especially when Calligarich writes about Rome – the city he so wonderfully characterized in his debut. He describes the centuries-old neighborhood around Piazza Navona, not yet taken over by tourists in the late 1960s, as a damp, secluded island: two-thirds enclosed within a bend of the Tiber, connected to the rest of the city only by bridges. It was ‘a refuge for exiled cosmopolitans—bohemians, journalists, and the likes—who, propelled by the tide of their existence, flocked to the drinking establishments huddled in the alleyways, all united by a kind of common, collective sense. That they were docked at a last refuge where man had built the best he could, but that didn’t save them from sooner or later becoming like the surrounding world beyond the bridges. A place like any other.’
Gianfranco Calligarich: In the embrace of the river. Translated from the Italian by Manon Smits. World Library; 224 pages; €22.99.