The Story of My Purity
A Novel
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
An exuberant tale of a man caught between faith and freedom, from one of Italy's most talented young novelists
Thirty years old, growing flabby in a sexless marriage, Piero Rosini has decided to dedicate his life to Jesus. He's renounced the novels and American music that were filling his head with bullshit; he's moved out of his fancy bourgeois neighborhood, which was keeping him from finding spiritual purity and the Lord's truth. Now that he and his wife have settled into an unfinished housing development on the far outskirts of Rome, he'll be able to really concentrate on his job at an ultraconservative Catholic publishing house, editing books that highlight the decadence and degradation of modern society, including one claiming that Pope John Paul II was secretly Jewish. But Piero is suffocating. He worries that The Jewish Pope might be taking things too far. He can't get his beautiful sister-in-law out of his head. Temptations are breaking down his religious resolve. He decides to flee to Paris, which turns out not to be the best way of guarding his purity.
With a charismatic narrator as familiar with the finer points of Christian theology as with the floor layout of IKEA and the schedules of European budget airlines, Francesco Pacifico's exuberant novel brings us Europe old and new and the inner workings of a conflicted but always compelling mind. The Story of My Purity is fiction with great humor, intelligence, neuroticism, and vision, from a young writer at the beginning of a tremendous career.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this strained comic novel, Pietro Rosini, out of shape and unhappily married, tries to emulate the pope and lead a life of purity. Employed as an editor at a Catholic publishing house, he toils on a nonfiction book, The Jewish Pope, about the late Pope John Paul II. There are temptations all around him, including his beautiful, virginal sister-in-law, Ada, and the free-spirited Lavinia. After getting himself fired, Pietro moves from Rome to Paris, sans wife, where he gets a job with another Catholic publisher. But even here Pietro finds temptation, now in the form of Clelia, a vibrant, young New York Jew. Keeping things platonic, he moves into the Pigalle apartment she lives in that is owned by her uncle. When The Jewish Pope is published, Pietro worries that it will affect his relationships with Clelia and her uncle. Ada's unexpected arrival precipitates a final, farcical chain of events. The story would be funnier and more entertaining if Piero weren't such a wet blanket and actually did something beyond pining and feeling guilty. A more notable aspect of the book is the way that Piero views every situation through the scrim of American pop culture.
