GIANFRANCO CALLIGARICH’S Last Summer in the City is a slim masterpiece about a young man who moves to Rome, fails at journalism, fails at love, and ultimately fails at life. Leo Gazzara counts among literature’s great losers, an unforgettable forgettable, and Last Summer is one of those delicious minor works, enmeshed in a particular place and a particular time, that only rarely escape the confines of a national literature and onto the commercial lists of varsity American publishers. FSG’s new edition, beautifully translated by Howard Curtis, is just one of a number of new translations of Calligarich currently in the works. This new rediscovery, bigger than any before, marks the writer’s definitive entrance onto the stage of world literature.
Despite its initial success upon publication (at Natalia Ginzburg’s insistence) in 1973, Calligarich’s novel has long traveled under the radar as a cult classic, and it’s easy to see why. It’s the opposite of a winner — in fact, the book is about a total loser, a near-perfect example of that Italian type, the sfigato. Leo, in that uncomfortable territory around his 30th year, moves from his native Milan down to Rome. There he works for a “medical-literary” paper until its aristocratic patron goes bankrupt, and Leo’s meetings with the old count lose their remaining veneer of professionalism and become roving conversations about the frivolous things — horses and romance and social hijinks — that still delight the titled gentry. Leo is himself a self-styled aristocrat, though born into the wrong class: when asked where he would like to have been born, he replies, “In Vienna before the end of the empire.” He turns down a new job writing copy for a pharmaceutical trade paper because it sounds like too much work. He decides to wait for something else, “[l]ike an aristocrat…
