Separate Rooms (Camere separate) by Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Simon Pleasance (translation), André Aciman (foreword) instant download

Separate Rooms (Camere separate) by Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Simon Pleasance (translation), André Aciman (foreword) instant download

Original Italian title: Camere separate (1989)

“A story of love & youth & pain that will have you clutching at your heart. I want everyone to read it; I want to press it into people's hands. Surely one of the best novels I've ever read.” — Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Less & Less Is Lost

Soon to be a major film adaptation by Luca Guadagnino, Separate Rooms is a masterpiece of Italian literature, & a heartbreaking portrait of love, grief, & the daily realities of being a gay man in 1980s Europe.

Thomas, a young German musician, is dying. His older boyfriend, a renowned Italian writer named Leo, finds it impossible to watch the slow & inevitable demise of his lover. So, he condemns himself to wandering the earth instead, moving cities every few weeks in the hope of finding the dividing line between the living & the dead.

He travels through Europe where past & present overlap, years merge and faces emerge, & reminders of the life he & Thomas shared are on every corner. From their meeting & nights spent in Paris to the drug-induced flight through the forests of northern France that spelled [GU1] the end, Leo’s memories become clearer with every road he takes-much as he wishes he could simply forget. While alive, & wanting to preserve the passion of their relationship, Leo had forced Thomas to live separately: in separate rooms, separate towns, with separate lives. But now, face to face with true solitude, Leo must finally reckon with the impossible striving of memory to recreate life and, ultimately, cross an ocean to find the strength to go on.

André Aciman’s Call Me by Your Name meets Ocean Vuong’s On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous in Pier Vittorio Tondelli’s Separate Rooms: a singular & unforgettable meditation on almost-ideal love, told in three musical movements, by a treasured literary talent never before published in the US.

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Pier Vittorio Tondelli made his debut in 1980 with Altri libertini, which was followed in 1982 by Pao Pao.