A slim masterpiece ... 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 ... Beautifully translated.
Masterfully translated ... The novel is indeed very visual ... [A] short, eminently readable novel ... Despite the exquisite chatter surrounding Proust and decadence, Chandler and despair, the reigning voice in this novel is silence ... The novel feels as relevant today as it ever was.
Elegantly translated ... Last Summer in the City has the languorous disaffection of the mid-twentieth century ... It is at once bombastic and melodramatic, simultaneously passionate and ironic, thoroughly enjoyable and very much of its time ... The novel is accented with oblique romantic banter, inflected by soul-searching and artistic pretension ... The novel, like the films that it recalls, offers a seductive, stylized fantasy of life; but one that, before the advent of the internet, had real resonance ... For those of us old enough to recall such aimless, yearning days, the novel is moving in spite of its silliness.
Unambitious and apathetic as he might appear to be, however, the story of Leo is nevertheless one of delicate beauty that imparts the prevalent, existential angst that defined a generation of young men amidst the Italy of the 70s. In the vein of postwar Italian neorealism, Calligarich spends much of the text on bringing texture and illustration to the humble details of everyday life, and the resulting cinematic effect can likely be referred back to the author’s experience as a screenwriter. Leo’s story counteracts the adulation of glamour and happiness in Fascist propaganda, which holds little to no concern for the personal difficulties of everyday life—boredom, failure, or grief. Instead of telling the simple, customary story of a powerful and desirable man amidst a cosmopolitan enchantment, Last Summer in the City presents a marginalized individual’s quotidian, melancholic tale in a provincial setting. The quiet, understated prose emanates an almost diaristic intimacy into the narrator’s mind, providing an avenue to access his inner vacuum of emptiness, and the terrible simplicity of his apathy ... It is a timeless work of watching life flow past, providing an alternate sea for both the ones who seek to escape the mainstream waters of progress, and those who have been forgotten and left in the wayside.
The account of a lost generation in Rome in the early 1970s...carries the weight of both family history and generational saga ... A portrait of a young man adrift in a world where meaning has been swept away.
Evocative ... While Leo’s unexamined poor treatment of others, especially Arianna, feels a bit dated, the feeling that Leo is alone in the world is poignantly conveyed. The scenery alone makes this worth a look.
