SEPARATE ROOMS, classic Italian novel of grief and loss in the AIDS plague's early years

SEPARATE ROOMS
PIER VITTORIO TONDELLI (tr. Simon Pleasance)
Zando (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$14.99 ebook, available tomorrow

Rating: 5* of five

The Publisher Says: Thomas, a young German musician, is dying. His older boyfriend, a renowned Italian writer named Leo, finds it impossible to watch the slow and inevitable demise of his lover; he condemns himself to moving cities every few weeks instead, in the hope of finding a semblance of peace.

He travels through Europe where past and present overlap, years merge and faces emerge—and where reminders of the life he and Thomas shared are on every corner. Leo's memories become clearer with every road he takes, much as he wishes he could simply forget. While alive, and 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: Separate Rooms is a singular and unforgettable meditation on almost-ideal love, told in three musical movements, by a fiery and unforgettable literary talent.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA NETGALLEY. THANK YOU.

My Review: This book came out in Italian in 1989. I assume most of y'all remember something about 1989, but probably not the sheer awfulness of the AIDS epidemic eating the gay-men's communities around the world at that time.

I was there. I loved and lost more than once in the hell of the times. It happened like Tondelli, dead a year and a half after this book appeared, said it did:

In his last moments, Thomas is back in the family fold, with the same people who brought him into the world. Now, with their hearts torn asunder by suffering, they are helping Thomas to die. There is no room for Leo in this parental reconciliation. Leo is not married to Thomas. He has not had children with him. Neither of them bears the other's name at the registry office, and there is not a single legal record on the face of the earth that carries the signatures of witnesses to their union. Yet for more than three years they have been passionately in love with one another. They have lived together in Paris and Milan, and they have travelled together, played music together and danced together. They have quarrelled and abused each other, and even hated each other. They have been in love. But it is as if, without warning, beside that deathbed, Leo realised that he had experienced not a great love story, but rather some little school crush. As if they were telling him: You've both had a good time, and that's okay, too. But here we're fighting a life and death struggle. Here a life is at stake. And we—a father, a mother and a son—are what really matters.

That made Thomas one of the lucky ones, the ones whose families did not reject him, refuse to see him, or came to his deathbed simply to reject him one final time. Leo? Oh please, like anyone not gay thought a thing of the feelings and needs of the ones left behind!

The book is a series of leaps and hops in space...around the cities Thomas and Leo occupied for moments in time...and time, either spent together or remembered in the loss of love, or remembered in the moment of being there as one of the spaces Thomas wasn't with Leo. I think this fracturing into the three acts of an operetta, as Tondelli said he aimed to do, this absence of cohesion in the third-person narrative awareness, pretty perfectly explains grief's effects on the grieving mind.

In the grief of losing one's belovèd partner there's a profound silence. Leo's early response of lurching heedlessly from pillar to post is a way many people have of trying to escape that horrific, entombing silence. In looking at places he saw with Thomas, there's a sense that the existence of the places he saw with his love somehow, in some small corner of their physicality, contain an Akashic record of the emotional bond they shared. It's as though Leo, seeing this place or that, gets his love now vanished without a record, memorialized. If people still living don't see Thomas and Leo's love as valid, the squares of Paris or Milan recorded and validated it by holding them as their moments ran steadily out. In Leo's still-prevalent idea of what makes a couple worthy of acknowledgment, these places are the best substitutes he can identify for external validation.

By the third movement Leo feels, as he did in their life, that he and Thomas are meant to live in separate rooms. There is no more separate room than the tomb. Leo, permaybehaps too late, thinks his way through his actions in light of the ending of the love story he so possessed, the love object he so powerfully cherished. It is not a story about Leo's resolution of his regrets. It is Leo's reckoning with his (now alienated from their proper object) feelings. It is Leo's possibly impermanent realization that he, and Thomas, simply were not going to be able to invent for themselves and each other a way to accept they could live in anything but separate rooms.

I don't think it will speak to everyone. It spoke to me because my "Thomas" is ever with me, as Leo's is in this récit. The reckoning Leo is doing, I have done, and expect I'll do many years to come.

It's very beautiful. It is the last work Tondelli ever completed. It might mean a lot to people like me who lived it; but the experience of intense grief for what one has experienced the tearing, severing, bloody viciousness of death ripping away will speak to you all.

Maybe not today, but it will.