I liked Separate Rooms but often had trouble articulating just why I liked it: nothing much happens, Leo is not the most likeable protagonist, and all his relationships are various shades of toxic (though "flawed" might be a more generous word here). And yet I did like it. It's atmospheric and moody, really communicating the feeling of aloneness and grief within a glittering cosmopolitan European arts scene. It is an achingly intimate portrait of Leo's grief. And though unnamed, the spectre of the HIV/AIDS pandemic hangs quietly and cruelly over the entire novel, made crueller by the fact that we know Tondelli himself would die of AIDS in 1991. Pleasance's translation is quite beautiful and sad and (in my opinion) really captures the novel's spirit.

While it wasn't my favourite read, I did like Separate Rooms, and I intend to see the film when it is released (though unsure whether I will end up liking it). I'd recommend it to anyone looking to read more translated fiction, to read a contemporary account of the gay arts scene in Europe in the 1980s, and/or to engage with really deep literary explorations of grief. Or for any global film buffs who'd like an idea of what the film will be about.

Many thanks to @zandoprojects and @netgalley for the opportunity to review this.

#bookstagram #bookreview #arcreview #bookrecommendations #translatedfiction #SeparateRooms #NetGalley

so it's a classic Italian gay novel and some of the prose is just hauntingly beautiful. yes, there's sort of a plot though really its more about life (and living) than some sort of structured narrative. it certainly demands you pay constant attention to its time jumps and mood swings, since otherwise you'll be lost.

I'm better for having read it, I think - but It's not really something I see myself going back to anytime soon.

This book came out in Italian in 1989. I assume most of y'all remember something about 1989, but probably not the sheer awfulness of the AIDS epidemic eating the gay-men's communities around the world at that time.

I was there. I loved and lost more than once in the hell of the times. It happened like Tondelli, dead a year and a half after this book appeared, said it did:
"In his last moments, Thomas is back in the family fold, with the same people who brought him into the world. Now, with their hearts torn asunder by suffering, they are helping Thomas to die. There is no room for Leo in this parental reconciliation. Leo is not married to Thomas. He has not had children with him. Neither of them bears the other's name at the registry office, and there is not a single legal record on the face of the earth that carries the signatures of witnesses to their union. Yet for more than three years they have been passionately in love with one another. They have lived together in Paris and Milan, and they have travelled together, played music together and danced together. They have quarrelled and abused each other, and even hated each other. They have been in love. But it is as if, without warning, beside that deathbed, Leo realised that he had experienced not a great love story, but rather some little school crush. As if they were telling him: You've both had a good time, and that's okay, too. But here we're fighting a life and death struggle. Here a life is at stake. And we—a father, a mother and a son—are what really matters."
That made Thomas one of the lucky ones, the ones whose families did not reject him, refuse to see him, or came to his deathbed simply to reject him one final time. Leo? Oh please, like anyone not gay thought a thing of the feelings and needs of the ones left behind!

The book is a series of leaps and hops in space...around the cities Thomas and Leo occupied for moments in time...and time, either spent together or remembered in the loss of love, or remembered in the moment of being there as one of the spaces Thomas wasn't with Leo. I think this fracturing into the three acts of an operetta, as Tondelli said he aimed to do, this absence of cohesion in the third-person narrative awareness, pretty perfectly explains grief's effects on the grieving mind.

In the grief of losing one's belovèd partner there's a profound silence. Leo's early response of lurching heedlessly from pillar to post is a way many people have of trying to escape that horrific, entombing silence. In looking at places he saw with Thomas, there's a sense that the existence of the places he saw with his love somehow, in some small corner of their physicality, contain an Akashic record of the emotional bond they shared. It's as though Leo, seeing this place or that, gets his love now vanished without a record, memorialized. If people still living don't see Thomas and Leo's love as valid, the squares of Paris or Milan recorded and validated it by holding them as their moments ran steadily out. In Leo's still-prevalent idea of what makes a couple worthy of acknowledgment, these places are the best substitutes he can identify for external validation.

By the third movement Leo feels, as he did in their life, that he and Thomas are meant to live in separate rooms. There is no more separate room than the tomb. Leo, permaybehaps too late, thinks his way through his actions in light of the ending of the love story he so possessed, the love object he so powerfully cherished. It is not a story about Leo's resolution of his regrets. It is Leo's reckoning with his (now alienated from their proper object) feelings. It is Leo's possibly impermanent realization that he, and Thomas, simply were not going to be able to invent for themselves and each other a way to accept they could live in anything but separate rooms.

I don't think it will speak to everyone. It spoke to me because my "Thomas" is ever with me, as Leo's is in this récit. The reckoning Leo is doing, I have done, and expect I'll do many years to come.

It's very beautiful. It is the last work Tondelli ever completed. It might mean a lot to people like me who lived it; but the experience of intense grief for what one has experienced the tearing, severing, bloody viciousness of death ripping away will speak to you all.

Maybe not today, but it will.

Thank you to Zando for sending me an e-arc of the new, translated version of this book prior to publication.

'Separate Rooms' tells the story of Leo and Thomas. When Leo's lover Thomas passes away, Leo is left remembering their life together in Paris, and recounts this life through the pages of the book. To gain some clarity amongst his grief, Leo decides to travel. In his travels, he begins to accept the power and importance of memory, and how this will help him to go forward.

This BOOK! Absolutely astoundingly beautiful prose, and the story was incredible. A little bit slow-paced at points, however it kept me hooked and that is all that matters. I felt moved the whole way through this story, and it was so brilliant.

It’s hard to say where my feelings of this land. I think it’s beautifully written; touching and raw. However, I also found it slow and sometimes hard to get back into reading.

Leo’s character has incredible depth, and the way this story flows through the stages of grief creates a special reading experience. I loved the way this showed the complexities of relationships. I think this book will have a profound impact on many of its readers.

If Luca Guadagnino is attaching his name to something, you better believe that it's going to be a tragedy. And you better believe that it's going to rip your heart into a million pieces. This was no different. Though I have noticed that there are similarities between all of the things that Guadagnino attaches his name to, but that has nothing to do with this book or the story. Which I enjoyed thoroughly.

Some books don’t want to be dissected. They just want to be felt.

Separate Rooms doesn’t tell a story so much as it traces the aftershocks of one: Leo has lost the man he loved. He’s in his thirties. He’s a writer. And he’s trying to live through grief while the world continues around him like nothing’s happened.

There’s no plot to speak of. No resolution. No thesis. Just memory, intimacy, and isolation folding in on themselves. The novel moves in spirals, looping between past and present, desire and distance, tenderness and failure. You can’t track it on a map, but you can feel where it’s going.

Tondelli isn’t interested in performance. This isn’t a story about gay pride or identity politics or AIDS as metaphor. It’s about love, specifically the kind of love that doesn’t come with instruction manuals or social scripts. The kind that feels real and total in private, but still doesn’t count in the eyes of a hospital room or a family or the law.

That tension—between the life you’ve built with someone and the world’s refusal to see it—sits at the center of the book. Not as a political argument, but as a quiet fact.

It hit hard.

I didn’t grow up seeing models for what a queer life could look like, let alone a queer grief. Reading this, I felt the shape of something I’ve known but rarely find the words for: what it means to love deeply while still feeling peripheral. What it means to carry real history with someone and have it treated like a phase, or worse, a fantasy.

There’s a passage near the end—simple, unadorned, brutal—where Leo understands that no matter what he shared with Thomas, it will never be legible in the terms that matter most. It won’t be remembered. It won’t be archived. It won’t be mourned properly.

And still, he loved him.

That’s what stayed with me.

If you’re looking for a structured novel, this won’t do it. But if you’ve ever tried to build a life in the margins, or held tightly to something in the dark without knowing whether it counted, you might find something here.

I’m grateful this book exists and has been translated into English. I hope Luca Guadagnino's upcoming movie adaptation is able to capture the emotional core of the work and bring folks to the text.

Republished and translated in English - Thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for a copy for review

Separate Rooms is a devastating look at love, death, and identity. Our main character Leo grapples with the his love for and the death of Thomas, switching between past and present timelines. This is not a plot-heavy book. It's writing-heavy, emotionally driven, and focuses on the emotion, contemplations on love, life, self, the world, etc. I found it beautiful and heartbreaking.

Halfway through reading, I was thrilled to find out this is being turned into a movie and will be directed by Luca Guadagnino (Challengers, Call Me By Your Name, Bones & All, Queer). I have faith that it'll be a beautiful transition from book to film.

There’s a lot of previous queer books in this, it feels like it’s taken the best parts of other gay books and combined them in one. Interesting to know this actually predates all of them so they are likely inspired by this. It’s appealing and touching and I’d recommend it to so many people that I know.

I really wanted to love this book, but unfortunately, it just didn’t work for me. The tone felt overly pedantic from page one, which made it difficult to stay engaged and actually like the narrator. It's not a light read--it's quite heavy--and also not the kind of heavy that you can read in short bursts. The narrative depends on an engaged reader. Despite my best efforts, I found myself putting it down about a quarter of the way through.

Thank you to NetGalleyt for providing me a copy of this book. I've been waiting to read this book ever since I learned about it, but was sad to hear the English edition was rare to find. So you can only imagine how excited I was to learn this is being re-released in English! The wait was worth it. A sad, gloomy story about love and loss. What sets this apart from other gay novels is the focus on solitude and how Leo deals with loneliness and loss. I had to knock a star off for its non-linear narrative, which was confusing at times.

This is a beautifully written and translated text, but I found it challenging to finish due to the nonlinear writing style and the sometimes dense nature of Leo’s inner monologue. While the emotional intensity of Leo’s recollections with Thomas was palpable, the more philosophical sections lost my attention.

At certain points it was also difficult to discern the timeline within the narrative, as the book is divided into only three distinct sections. Page breaks are used instead of formal chapters that abruptly transition from the current timeline to a time in Leo’s past. (The e-arc format of the document didn't help.)

Although this book didn’t particularly resonate with me, I believe it was a good read and would be a suitable fit for certain readers.

Wow what gorgeous writing! I am stunned by how beauitful I foudn the story. My heart hurts, I am moved, I won't soon be forgetting this book!

Separate Rooms by Pier Vittorio Tondelli is a beautifully introspective novel that offers a unique exploration of grief - not as something to be overcome, but as an ongoing state of being that reshapes a person's sense of self. Originally published in the 80s but only now translated into English for the first time (which is surprising to me given its depth and literary merit), this novel eschews traditional plot in favor of a deeply personal character study.

Tondelli's prose is stunning, often meandering in a way that feels purposeful, like a stream of consciousness that mirrors the protagonist's emotional state. While some passages feel a bit long-winded, the novel is filled with strikingly beautiful lines that make it worth the effort. The non-linear structure can sometimes make it challenging to reorient yourself after stepping away, but it ultimately reinforces the fragmented nature of grief.

What makes Separate Rooms particularly affecting is how it doesn't dwell in overt sadness, but instead captures the quieter, more mundane aspects of loss - the necessity of carrying on, of rediscovering one's own passions and desires in the aftermath of love and loss. Tondelli portrays grief not just as sorrow but as transformation, a force that alters the way one understands oneself and the world. Though demanding at times, this novel is a deeply rewarding meditation on love, memory, and the quiet persistence of life after loss.

Separate Rooms originally came out in the 80s and has now been translated into English and what a treasure that is. This is a story filled with love, with tears, with memories, isolation, grief but mostly love. And it makes you feel so many things all at once it becomes a tad bit overwhelming at times. But I wouldn't change a thing. On the contrary I would gladly put myself through such pain again that's how good the book was. Would I recommend it to everyone? No, I understand that non-linear stories that are slow and nostalgic at times aren't everyone's cup of tea. But if you enjoy getting pulled into a story that lacks huge drama points and it all feels like one long dream (albeit a tragic one), this is a book for you.

It feels criminal that Separate Rooms is the only work of Pier Vittorio Tondelli available in English translation. It’s immediately apparent, from the very first handful of pages, why this is such a highly regarded piece of Italian fiction.

Tondelli’s work is deceptively simple: a non-linear, stream of consciousness narrative where the structure and prose manage to come across as straightforward and effortless when it’s anything but. Separate Rooms reads like an improvised monologue, a recitation of one man’s life, not once stumbling or lagging.

It’s exceedingly rare that just any piece of writing succeeds in this. What’s not rare is consistently watching other accomplished and even seasoned authors attempt the same, and having that effort—despite, perhaps, otherwise strong writing—glaringly show through. Separate Rooms is a special outlier though, a sharp star that pulls off—without a hitch—what so many others try, and fail, to accomplish.

Incredibly lean, Separate Rooms is concise in its exploration of grief—the day to day mundanity, the figurative death of the one left behind. For the titular Leo, after losing his partner, previous interests and passions drain away. And it’s his attempting—or more often stumbling upon—moments of enjoyment and meeting people who still spark his interest in brief bursts, where Tondelli is at his strongest and most introspective.

Here’s hoping that the announced Luca Guadagnino adaptation actually gets made—with the director’s wide slate of projects. Guadagnino has always been incredibly adept at adapting material for the screen that honors the source and, in many ways, even surpasses it.

If anything, a film might lead to Tondelli’s body of work finally being more widely translated. And that would be the most substantial gain.

(Huge thank you to Zando for allowing me to preview this edition before its release.)

Thanks to NetGalley for the review copy in exchange for an honest review

An interesting portrayal of grief and how it transforms a person. This novel is presented in three acts, each of which finds Leo at a different place and time while he reels from his sudden separation from Thomas. Leo seems to come to the realization that he will never love someone as much as he did Thomas so he shuts himself from the world and turns inward so that he can find himself by reflecting on his past experiences with Thomas.

A beautifully written novel, although at times I found it to be too self-involved and descriptive. At one point I wondered if the character of Leo wasn’t simply selfish but I’m glad I kept reading and discovered his grief was multi-faceted. If anything, this reads like more of an autobiography than fiction, and I wish it had been advertised as such.

I'll give a 3 but it wasn't for me.
The book is sad not just given the context but also in writing. And I found it kind of boring. Contemplated DNFing but there were good parts. The jumping around in time, in a book with hardly any chapters, didn't work well for me.
Thank you, Netgalley!

Beautifully written story that keeps you motivated and focused. I started this book and it was a bit slow for my taste but it was worth the reading.

In the wake of his long-term boyfriend’s death, Leo flees, across Europe, to New York, back to his hometown, wherever he can go to in his attempt to outrun his grief. Separate Rooms, follows Leo’s journey through these travels. It’s a really beautiful examination of grief and how this death sort of represents a loss of innocence for Leo and ultimately forces him to confront how his childhood and sexuality have shaped him and the ways he interacts with the world. I often find it harder to talk about books I’ve loved compared to books I haven’t, and this book is no different, but what I can say is that the writing is beautiful, the narrative is thoughtful, the portrayal of grief feels so real, and Leo as a character is well-rounded and compelling.