Separate Rooms

By Pier Vittorio Tondelli

Book Overview

"A story of love and youth and 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 and Less Is Lost

Soon to be a major film adaptation by Luca Guadagnino, Separate Rooms is a masterpiece of Italian literature, and a heartbreaking portrait of love, grief, and 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 and 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 and the dead.

He travels through Europe where past and present overlap, years merge and faces emerge, and reminders of the life he and Thomas shared are on every corner. From their meeting and 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, 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.

Andr 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 and unforgettable meditation on almost-ideal love, told in three musical movements, by a treasured literary talent never before published in the US.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1638932085
• ISBN13: 9781638932086
• Release Date: April 2025
• Publisher: Zando
• Length: 256 Pages

Customer Reviews

A real find!

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?" I haven't yet talked to anyone else who has ever read this book, which is a shame. It should be widely read.

Tearfully beautiful!

Beautiful book! Simply heart-wrenchingly beautiful! What a precious little gem! I keep returning to search for another book by the author, even though I know he's dead... I get angry at him that he died before writing another... I guess it is one of those unique masterpieces where the write has written but one work.. but one. And the passion of a human facing his mortality exudes on every page: loss, love, memory, death, and all the other ghosts that haunt us... I will read it again and again and again!

read it!

Tondelli is able to touch us deeply with this awesome book in which the boundary between auto-biography and fiction seems to collapse in the telling of a wonderful love story. The crisis of the lost love and of the lost of youth are the main themes. The words flow constantly, without pausing and reaching the perfection of a masterpiece.

un viaggio al centro dei nostri tempi

Tondelli descrive, con la forza evocativa delle sue parole, un viaggio al centro del nostro tempo. In Leo ritroviamo l'egoismo e la generosità, la ricerca del divino e il compiacimento nel degrado morale, lo slancio verso la frenesia delle metropoli e l'ansia di ritrovare le proprie radici culturali nelle tradizioni della campagna emiliana. Parlando di se, Tondelli parla di noi, di quanto sia faticoso assecondare ogni giorno la mutevole direzione dei nostri desideri e della nostra missione.

immagini eccezionali

grande capacità evocativa associata alle parole. Un romanzo incredibile per la sua compattezza, la sua forza e fragilità. Si rimane sempre con la voglia di andare avanti, non tanto per scoprire qualcosa, quanto per godere delle immagini che riga dopo riga, magicamente si formano nella mente. Leggi la parte quando Leo torna al paese e passeggia per le vie del centro, guardando dentro le case attraverso i vetri delle finestre....uno tra i libri migliori.