The Women I Love
A Novel
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- 10,99 €
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- 10,99 €
Publisher Description
A provocative and bracing send-up of modern masculinity, from the author of Class and The Story of My Purity
Marcello, an editor and poet, is on the brink of his forties. Like everyone in his life, including his sister-in-law, he’s writing a novel. This novel. This novel will be about women. Love. Growing older. Maybe even taking responsibility. But unfortunately for Marcello, the women in his life resist definition. They flit and flicker constantly between archetype and actuality: sirens and saviors, subordinates and savants, vixens and villains.
So Marcello cannot write plainly about love. Instead, he tries to write into the complexities of his many relationships: Eleonora, the junior editor, his former protegeé and sometime lover; Barbara, his claustrophobic girlfriend; his estranged gay sister; his elegant mother.
Fresh, frank, and painfully cool, Francesco Pacifico’s The Women I Love dives nakedly into gender, sex, and power. Set in a vivid and alcoholic Italy, it acknowledges and subverts the narrow ways canonical male writers gaze at, and somehow fail to see, women—illuminating the possibility of equity between people in love, in bed, in work, and in life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A wealthy lapsed poet approaching 40 dissects his relationships with women while trying to write a novel in Pacifico's drifting send-up of the toxic literary man archetype (after Class). Marcello commutes from Rome to Milan for a job as an editor, where he carries on an affair with another editor, Eleonora. He becomes unsettled when she eclipses him at work, and slinks home to his girlfriend, Barbara, preferring to quit rather than accept a promotion. Marcello then convinces his father to buy the condo he and Barbara rent, and marries her despite fixating on a rumor that she's cheated on him. In his newfound free time, he reminisces about his childhood, prompting a move to Milan to reconnect with his older rebellious sister, Irene, from whom he'd been estranged for many years. Marcello's many digressions feature snippets from his novel in progress, which include confusion and rationalizing over whether Eleonora had consented to all of their sexual encounters, and line up with an indictment from one of Marcello's friends: "You do seem to know—at least at some level—just how disgusting you are." The protagonist's ambivalent, messy emotions propel this amusing foray. It adds up to a darkly funny exploration of entanglements and terminal self-regard.
