Pier Vittoro Tondelli, the author of four novels and a collection of short stories, died of AIDS in 1991, at the age of 36. To judge from Separate Rooms , his first novel to appear in English, Tondelli s death deprived us of a singular voice. In Simon Pleasance s able translation from the ltalian, the authors lyricism and low-key humor successfully content with the weight of an immense melancholy. And despite its casual texture, Ton- dellis prose never deviates far from the "seam of that other reality that we call art".
Leo, the protagonist of Separate Rooms , is an author in his 30s. Like his creator, he settles in Milan after growing up in a small town in the Po Valley and undergoes the rigors of a homosexual existence in a society even more resolutely closed than our own. His sense of alienation from the mainstream is absolute. Yet Separate Rooms is hardly a sexual polemic. Its focus, after all, is grief-like love, a universal, equal opportunity e- motion. And whom is Leo grieving for？ Early in the novels scrambled chronology he meets Thomas, a young German pianist living temporarily in Paris. Attraction is fol- lowed by infatuation, which is followed by love, and the two begin a long affair, travel- ing together and exchanging visits over a three-year period.
Their romance, however, remains long-distance. For as Leo recognizes, his solitary temperament prohibits him from loving anybody without the buffer of separate rooms. The lovers therefore begin a feverish correspondence——and here is where Leos creative and erotic lives begin to converge. The physical separation of the two men shunts their relationship from sexuality into language, from life into literature.
"Above all," Tondelli writes, "their letters became a record of their life together, like two scribes passionately committing to paper, for the sake of history. So their let- ters progressed from being love letters to being records of a kind of evolution. From this, they then grew as if calcified, like white blocks of granite, turning into things gound in an archaeological excavation of the impossible, but real, attempt at love."
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