Separate Rooms - Masks Author:Pier Vittorio Tondelli, Simon Pleasance (Translator) He sees everything like a prison built of words that have become a mere commodity. The John Fante-television, the Jack Kerouac-dishwasher, the Peter Handke-chairs, the Patricia Highsmith-plants, the Linus-table, the Rockstar-bookcase, the L'Espresso wardrobe, the Transeuropa Editions-computer, the German translation rights-bathroom marble, the T... more »urkish translation rights in France-rugs, the film rights-car.Leo is an Italian writer in his thirties. Thomas, his German lover, is dead. On a plane to Munich, Thomas's home town, Leo slips into a reverie of their meeting and life in Paris, nights in Thomas's flat in Montmartre and a desperate, drug-induced flight through the forests of northern France that spells the end for Leo and Thomas' languid, erotic life together. Leo travels to England to escape the brute continent and to descend into anonymity: In England... he is leaving behind him a continent that is being destroyed. Thomas was History. His country and his language were the scripts of war.Structured in three musical movements, Separate Rooms is a story of almost ideal homosexual love, cruelly broken by absence and separation. When Thomas was alive, he and Leo and him had separate rooms in order to preserve the urgency of their passion. Now, Leo faces solitude, the impossible striving of memory to recreate life and the hostility of a prejudiced world. Seperate Rooms, Tondelli's last book, is a powerful novel of the strength of love and the trauma of death.« less