About this item
Highlights
- A searing story about homecoming and belonging set in contemporary Rome Gabriele Bilancini hasn't been home for four years.
- Author(s): Daniele Mencarelli
- 192 Pages
- Fiction + Literature Genres, Friendship
Description
Book Synopsis
A searing story about homecoming and belonging set in contemporary Rome
Gabriele Bilancini hasn't been home for four years. Home is the Tuscolano neighborhood in Rome, where he was born and grew up with his parents, sister, and a tight-knit group of friends. Today, he lives in Milan and he's a world-famous designer. The perfect example of "making it."
Back home, nothing has changed. His friends' lives above all: everything is the same, as if no time at all had passed. Ashamed of his origins, but unsatisfied with his present, however successful, Gabriele finds himself enveloped into the sweet, suffocating embrace of the past. An embrace that will force him to confront the deep fracture within himself.
Mencarelli distills these elements with stunning clarity in a fast-paced novel. He offers us a passionate portrait of a Roman suburban neighborhood that could be any suburb, real or imagined, where the protagonist nurtures a desire to express himself that is never satisfied, and a need to belong that can never be fulfilled.
Review Quotes
Praise for The House of Gazes
"When a poet who has a strong story to tell decides to write a novel, the result is a masterpiece."--Vanity Fair
"The most important book I have read this year. It's an autobiographical story, I believe, and it's about a rebirth."--La Stampa
"Essential and unforgettable."--la Repubblica
"Like Pasolini's, Mencarelli's is drawn towards the lost, the damned, those at the margins of society. Yet The House of Gazes, his first novel, is not simply a descent into human hell. It is a story of resurrection."--Il Giornale
"Miraculous. "--Il Messaggero
Praise for Everything Calls for Salvation
"An evocative work of autofiction...With its bracing view of the hero's interior world, this meditative novel viscerally excoriates the failings of his treatment."--Publishers Weekly
"Moving and engaging. This novel will stay with you."--Goffredo Fofi, Internazionale
"Mencarelli writes with the grace and power of a poet. His words illuminate truth like a flash of lightning."--Il Sole 24 Ore
"Mencarelli's writing is extraordinary for its intensity and empathy... His prose has the emotional force of poetry."--Radio Tre