Review by Booklist Review
The narrator of Pacifico's (Class, 2017) latest, Marcello, is a well-regarded editor and sometime poet soon to turn 40. The novel consists of Marcello's reflections on five women he has loved: Eleonora, a gifted editor and once his lover; Barbara, his long-term girlfriend; Daniela, his sister-in-law; Irene, his gay sister whom he longs to see again; and his impressive and contradictory mother. Marcello's career (and sometimes his desires) move him between the wealthy circles of Rome and Milan, places Pacifico evocatively describes. As he reflects on events and relationships, he considers his petty jealousies, alcohol-fueled misbehavior, and attempts to control others. Through self-deprecating parenthetical asides, Marcello underscores such issues so that, similar to Teju Cole's Open City (2014), this is partly a confession. Like the interviewees in David Foster Wallace's Brief Interviews with Hideous Men (1999), Marcello's toxic masculinity influences all he does, which Pacifico suggests partly stems from Marcello's inheritance, both monetary and genetic, from his imposing father. Beautifully translated by Elizabeth Harris, this is an entrancing novel, one that is full of complex and brilliantly realized characters.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
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. Agent: Anna Stein, ICM Partners. (Dec.)
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Review by Kirkus Book Review
Italian writer Pacifico's new novel is a disconcerting mix: part sendup of toxic masculinity, part middle-aged cad's apologia. Marcello is a classic man-child. Scion of a wealthy family that continues to support him, he's a poet and editor in his 30s who, feeling stuck, decides to make his mark with a memoir/novel about the women in his life: Eleonora, his fellow editor, protégé, and lover; his live-in girlfriend (and later wife), Barbara; his sister, estranged from her parents since she came out years ago; and his mother. The novel's real interest lies in the fact that he is not at all up to the job, at least initially. The portraits that emerge in the book's first half are mostly erotic self-portraits, the callow Marcello glimpsed sidelong in a mirror. The women he loves, it seems, are shape-shifters, elusive, complex, sybil-like figures who refuse to sit still and allow themselves, in the metaphor Marcello borrows from Nabokov, to be butterflies whose beauty is celebrated by getting pinned to a specimen board. The vain, bewildered Marcello seems at first like a man out of time, trying to replicate 1950s manhood (or the swaggering machismo of canonical male writers of the time) in a world that can no longer sustain it--and that he knows can no longer sustain it. But gradually, as he gets more accustomed to his limitations as man and as artist, as he reflects on the ways men have tried to capture or subdue or simplify women in their portraits, he relaxes, starts to pay attention. And once he's sufficiently chastened and self-conscious enough to give up on the ideal of master portraitist, the women emerge more sharply and in greater detail. A novel about the male gaze...and about what happens when its power has begun to dim. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
