The Girl on the Via Flaminia
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- £5.99
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- £5.99
Publisher Description
A dark love story set in wartime Rome from the author of In Love and Your Face for the World to See
Rome, 1944. Robert is a lonely American soldier looking for a girl. Lisa is cold and hungry, obliged to seek work at Mamma Pulcini's house on the Via Flaminia. Their lives come together in what should be a simple exchange, a temporary arrangement without love or complication. But in a city broken by war, its people defeated, nothing is simple. Based on Alfred Hayes'own experiences of wartime Italy, this spare, searing novel exposes the dark complexities of the relationship between men and women, victor and vanquished.
'Hayes has done for bruised men what Jean Rhys does for bruised women, and they both write heartbreakingly beautiful sentences' Paul Bailey, Guardian
'Rings true as gold ... every single character in the book is sharp with the infallible stroke of art' Daily Mail
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Hayes (1911 1985) was a novelist (My Face for the World to See), screenwriter (The Bicycle Thief; Clash by Night) and songwriter ("The Ballad of Joe Hill"). This grim novel of WWII, first published in 1949, opens on the Pulcini family of Rome's Via Flaminia, reduced to poverty after five years of war. They survive by converting their large apartment into a boardinghouse and nightly cafe for occupying American soldiers: bitter, insomniac "Mamma" Adele procures girls for the soldiers, while her vague, ineffectual husband, Ugo, and their seethingly hostile partisan son, Antonio, look on (in indifference and disgust, respectively). Through a departing tenant, lonely American private Robert Guarda arranges live at the Pulcini's with Lisa Costa, an young, blonde Italian woman who hopes to emigrate and whom Robert has never met. They're not married, but allow everyone to assume they are. Robert is bewildered by Italian hostility for the U.S., while Lisa feels increasingly cheapened and angry at his sense of entitlement over her vanquished country. In the end, their arrangement ("She was hungry, I was lonely") results in a sinking, hopeless shame. Hayes musters authentic detail and masterly control in this still-crackling melodrama.
