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| Home > Reads > Separate Rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli |
| Separate Rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli | | Date Created: Feb 17, 2005, 10:42 AM |
I picked up this little book completely by chance at the local bookstore the other day. This is the time of year when few new books are out and I have to dig a bit to find anything interesting to read.
I'd never heard of either the author or the book, but it was short enough so I bought it.
I was stunned. Tondelli pulls off, in 186 pages what some authors have been trying in several books to examine: why do men stay together. (It was a complete coincidence that I read this book after reading Comfort and Joy. The two books couldn't be more dissimilar.
Where Comfort and Joy is, in the end, optimistic about two men finding ways to love each other and live together, Separate Rooms is not.
Highly autobiographical, Separate Rooms tells the story of Leo, an Italian writer, and his lover Thomas. By the time the story begins, Thomas is already dead, and Leo is reflecting on their relationship and why it didn't work.
From the book:
"Now he had to give serious thought to the notion of living together with another man. But he had no models to follow, no experience to recycle and fall back on in this stage of their relationship. He knew that the love he still felt for Thomas would not be enough on its own. They would tear each other to pieces and that was the last thing he wanted... Living together meant believing in values that neither of them was capable of recognizing. How would their love end? Would they have no option but to normalize a relationship that society was in fact incapable of accepting as something normal? Would they not turn into the mirror image of those groteque homosexual couples where one does all the cooking and the other always goes to the market to do the shopping? Where the two lovers resemble each other in their attitudes, in their way of doing things, even in their facial expressions, to the point where they become two pathetic replicas of one and the same unbearable imaginary male, emasculated and effeminate?"
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