Viareggio Prize (Premio Viareggio / Premio Letterario Viareggio-Rèpaci)
The Bedroom
Tracing memory across generations, the work turns birth, love, loss, and the passage of time into a vast lyrical poem. It holds everyday detail and historical change in the same field of view, so it can be read as both poetry and family saga.
Work Information
A family history becomes a single long poem.
Known as Bertolucci's signature work, this long poem won the Viareggio Prize with its completed 1988 form. It follows family memory in a linked sequence of sections, rendering place, love, and death in richly textured language.
Review Summaries
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Many readers value the work's sweeping reach and the scale of its family-centered structure. Others feel that its length and density slow the reading pace, so it is often approached as a book that rewards patience.
Book Information
- Publisher
- Chelsea Editions
- Published
- 2012-03-01
- Pages
- 701 pages
- Language
- 英語
- Size
- 14.61 x 4.45 x 22.86 cm
- ISBN-13
- 9780982384930
- ISBN-10
- 0982384939
- Category
- 洋書/Literature & Fiction
Poetry. Bilingual Editon. Translated from the Italian by Luigi Bonaffini. THE BEDROOM [ La camera da letto ] is Bertolucci's best-known work, so popular that the poet once read it to television viewers on a seven-hour program. It is a narrative poem that traces the history of the poet's family across seven generations with directness, precision and attention to everyday details, major events and fantastic surprises. Paolo Lagazzi writes in his introduction: "THE BEDROOM is a sort of a multi-novel, or a distillation of very diverse narrative forms and intuitions: a Bildungsroman and fairytale, an epoch novel, a novel-chronicle, a dramatic novel and a picaresque novel. An experimental work in the most authentic sense of the word..." "Nothing of time's essence escapes or is neglected by the author's ravenous sensibility, no less active in recording the multiple places in which existence rests (the city and the countryside, the sea and the plane, the Po river and the Maremma) in an exuberant display of forms, lights, perspectives, tonalities."—Luigi Ferrara