The Italian Actress (Excelsior Editions) - Softcover

Lentricchia, Frank

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1438430442 ISBN 13: 9781438430447

Publisher: Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press, 2009

Synopsis

A has-been American filmmaker encounters love, cruelty, and death in Italy.

Set in Italy, Frank Lentricchia’s sixth novel features a has-been Italian American filmmaker, once internationally acclaimed for the beauty of his images and his experiments in pornography but now stuck in prolonged creative drought. At an obscure film festival in Volterra he meets the aging but still stunning Claudia Cardinale, star of Fellini’s 8½. She falls in love with him, but he resists, yet all the while wanting not to resist. Instead of remaining with Cardinale, he casts his lot with a perverse but compelling couple who convince him that he can regain his renown and achieve artistic immortality if he will only make a new film starring the two of them―an explicitly sexual film of shocking violence.

The Italian Actress is a meditation, by turns lyrical and bluntly brutal, on our obsession with celebrity, ambition, the cult of youthful beauty, romantic desire, the aging body, mortality, the power of the visual image, and underneath it all, the nature of visuality itself.

About this title

From the Back Cover:

Set in Italy, Frank Lentricchia's sixth novel features a has-been Italian American filmmaker, once internationally acclaimed for the beauty of his images and his experiments in pornography but now stuck in prolonged creative drought. At an obscure film festival in Volterra he meets the aging but still stunning Claudia Cardinale, star of Fellini's 8½. She falls in love with him, but he resists, yet all the while wanting not to resist. Instead of remaining with Cardinale, he casts his lot with a perverse but compelling couple who convince him that he can regain his renown and achieve artistic immortality if he will only make a new film starring the two of them--an explicitly sexual film of shocking violence.

The Italian Actress is a meditation, by turns lyrical and bluntly brutal, on our obsession with celebrity, ambition, the cult of youthful beauty, romantic desire, the aging body, mortality, the power of the visual image, and underneath it all, the nature of visuality itself.

"The Italian Actress is about high art in circumstances where high art makes little sense. Like the avant garde films of his protagonist, Jack Del Piero, Lentricchia's novel comprises an erotics without nudity, a virtuoso monologue that veils the embarrassments of flesh, making desire less its topic than its unspeakable condition. Anyone curious about that generation, now aging, whose talents were animated by modernism's radical aims will need to read this novel." -- R. M. Berry, coeditor of Fiction's Present: Situating Contemporary Narrative Innovation

"The Italian Actress is an engaging, literate, and often beautiful study of matters relevant to artistic morality and aesthetic representation. It does quite a lot of work in relatively few pages, managing to (gasp!) entertain, as well. " -- Kass Fleisher, author of The Bear River Massacre and the Making of History

About the Author:

Frank Lentricchia is Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature at Duke University. He is the author or editor of many books of literary criticism and theory, as well as six novels, including The Music of the Inferno, Lucchesi and the Whale, and The Book of Ruth. A theatrical adaptation by Jody McAuliffe of The Italian Actress was performed to acclaim in Durham, North Carolina, in 2009.

About this edition

• Publisher: Excelsior Editions/State University of New York Press
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 1438430442
• ISBN 13: 9781438430447
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 116