Review of Last Summer in the City by Gianfranco Calligarich

*Last Summer in the City* by Gianfranco Calligarich (2021). Published by FSG.

As much as I tell people I hate social media, and the fact that I don’t end up spending a ton of time scrolling through it, I end up finding a ton of my book recommendations through social media channels.

I’ve carefully curated my time on Instagram (although I put a cap on how long I spend on the app. It’s forty-five minutes) so that I’m following a bunch of Asian creators and consuming a wide variety of book suggestions outside of the typical trade publications I have a tendency to read in my free time. And, my online friends, is how I stumbled on Last Summer in the City.

It was the minimalist cover that got me with this one. I thought at first I had already read it, but then realized I was mixing up with the Cesare Pevare novel I had read a couple years prior to this.

So I logged onto my library account when I saw that it wasn’t actually the book I had read before, then ended up getting a copy in my hands. I read Last Summer in the City in one sitting when it was a Friday afternoon, as it was a pretty light read and didn’t consist of a ton of pages.

Onwards with the review!

Leo Gazarra wanders the streets of Rome, drunk half the time, and lives with his basic desires.

If there’s a book that pretty much can be summarized as vibes, while also capturing the essence of Italy’s capital in what I presume is the sixties or seventies, I would call this book that kind of story and writing.

Our protagonist is Leo, who comes to the city and has no desire to do anything specific with his life. He’s already thirty, originally from Milan, and leeches off the wealthy friends he’s met along the way. He essentially couch surfs at times in order to find shelter when he needs it, and somehow no one has gotten sick of him—or at least hasn’t said that to his face.

He also has a lover, Arianna, but he also isn’t too invested in that relationship either. Leo is pretty detached from the world and everyone in it, and I thought of his character a lot of like a piece of driftwood.

The good chunk of the novel consists of him wandering around trying to figure out what to do next that day, him discussing Arianna and their various issues, especially considering she is now suffering from poor mental health, and, towards the end of the novel, how one of his friends has died.

I mentioned in the first paragraph how a good chunk of this novel can be summarized as to vibes, but there’s a lot of literary and philosophical musings interjected into the narrative itself. As Leo wanders this ancient city in search of a purpose and something to do, there’s a lot of references to other great writers like Proust, and considering this is supposed to be set inside of his world (minus the fact it isn’t in first person), this implies to me that Leo is well-read, but simply lost.

This is a style of writing, although this book is in translation, that feels very much like it belongs in the canon of classic literature of the mid nineteen hundreds. Some do say this is now a classic of Italian literature, but it took a hot minute to come over to the United States, which is where I am currently reading these kinds of works for the first time. One of the book’s biggest flaws, though, is how deep we’re stuck inside of Leo’s head.

We see all these side characters, but because the novel is so short, we never get to spend a lot of time with them.

We are only invested in Leo’s narrative, and the character intended to serve as his wild lover gets a kind of sexist gloss that boils her down to archetypes we have seen before in how women are depicted in literature. She’s the mentally ill seductress who lives frivolously, spending her money on dresses and other useless things. That puts a bad taste in my mouth at the end of the day.

Overall Thoughts

Regardless, I think the writing in this book is gorgeous. It’s not the greatest story and relies on vibes, giving descriptions to Rome that flow beautifully as Leo travels across the streets without much of a purpose to his life.

It leaves a bit more to be desired when it comes to plot and characterization, making this read just fine for me. I wouldn’t purchase a copy for my personal library, and I’d probably not reread. I do think people should read it at least once, though.

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