A Man of No Moon: A Novel - Hardcover

McPhee, Jenny

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1582433755 ISBN 13: 9781582433752

Publisher: Counterpoint, 2007

Synopsis

It's 1948, and postwar Rome is giddy and chaotic. Poet Dante Sabato is attending yet another film industry soirée at Tullio Merlini's apartment off the Via del Corso. Disaffected and deeply self–absorbed, Dante finds Tullio's glamorous evenings tedious but welcomed any distraction. This raining evening, the distraction is double: sisters Gladys and Prudence Godfrey, both beautiful, sharp–witted, and remarkably compelling American actresses who have recently arrived in Rome. This new acquaintances leave the party together, and so begins a story of three damaged people struggling to live with their memories, and with themselves.

Exhausted by fascism and the Second World War, Dante finds refuge in the hope offered by the resurgent cinema, by American literature, and, in particular, by the pragmatic optimism and sexual energy of his American lovers. But after decades of struggling to defend the fallibility of his art, his nation, his family, and his own humanity, he remains convinced that the best expression of hope is to give up his life. The question for Dante is: Can Gladys and Prudence change his mind? Will he let them?

About this title

About the Author

Jenny McPhee is the Academic Director of the Center for Applied Liberal Arts Noncredit Programs and Clinical Assistant Professor teaching in the MS in Translation & Interpreting. She is the author of the novels The Center of Things, No Ordinary Matter, and A Man of No Moon, and she co-authored Girls: Ordinary Girls and Their Extraordinary Pursuits. Her translations from the Italian include books by the authors Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Giacomo Leopardi, Curzio Malaparte, Anna Maria Ortese, Paolo Maurensig, and Pope John Paul II. She has taught literary translation at Princeton University and she co-founded the Bronx Academy of Letters, an NYC public high school and middle school. She is a recipient of the Guggenheim Fellowship.

Reviews

A fictionalized retelling of the tragic post-WWII love affair between Italian writer Cesare Pavese and American noir starlet Constance Dowling, McPhee's latest excels in noirish atmosphere. In March 1948, poet and translator Dante Omerto Sabato, nearly 40, is saved from jumping off a Rome bridge by a patrolling American sergeant. In the months that follow, he meets a pair of fading U.S. actresses, Gladys and Prudence Godfrey, who have fled Hollywood to try their luck in Rome's thriving movie industry. Younger Gladys is a sexy little tart, but it is Prudence, the older, a cold dish incapable of loving a man, who recognizes Dante as Italy's most famous living poet. As relationships progress among the three, episodes from Dante's past hurtle through his mind, including a previous youthful love triangle and Dante's interrogations of Fascist prisoners late in the war. All three of McPhee's main characters seem intentionally unlikable, and the sex writing in particular designed to make Dante appear absurd: She came many times, and then, with the skill of the adept, let me reach my apex while inside one of her infertile orifices. McPhee draws entertainingly on the pulp of the period and has the postwar dynamic of occupier and occupied down. (Sept.)
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McPhee's noirish third novel is a departure from the lighter tone of her previous efforts, The Center of Things (2001) and No Ordinary Matter (2004). Vividly evoking World War II era Italy, McPhee limns the troubled life of Dante Sabato, a famous poet and translator who moves in Rome's elite social circles. At a party thrown by his friend Tullio, brooding Dante meets the Godfrey sisters. Americans Prudence and Gladys, both almost-beautiful actresses, are polar opposites: Prudence, is reserved and aloof, while Gladys is sensual and provocative. Dante starts an intense affair with Gladys as he pursues Prudence, and even after becoming involved with Prudence he continues to bed Gladys. But neither sister is enough to keep Dante, who before and during the war was both a political prisoner and an assassin, from his obsession with suicide. Though sometimes the characters seem more archetypal than real, Dante's inertia and ambivalence are achingly authentic. Inspired by the affair between writer Cesare Pavese and actress Constance Dowling, McPhee's novel is introspective and atmospheric. Huntley, Kristine

Edition details

• Publisher: Counterpoint
• Publication date: 2007
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1582433755
• ISBN 13: 9781582433752
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 288