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An American adventure in the Antonioni vein—visually rich and emotionally mysterious.
Part Mafia murder mystery, part novel of ideas, but most of all a love story, The Sadness of Antonioni follows Hank Morelli, a young assistant professor of film who is obsessed with Antonioni's L'Avventura. As he embarks on an unlikely romance with a Wendy's cashier, he is also drawn into the mystery of his grandfather's underworld connections and tempted by his department chair and his department chair's mysterious girlfriend, Nadia, to take part in a monstrous film project they are planning. Haunted throughout by the terror of time's raw present without exit, The Sadness of Antonioni is an American adventure in the Antonioni vein-visually rich and emotionally mysterious-in which an unlikely young couple navigates the difficult waters of their relationship, each suffering the remnants of a violent past that must be resolved if they hope to stay together. Heartrending and unsparing, yet with a persistent comic vein, this is Frank Lentricchia's seventh and most ambitious and disturbing novel to date.
"…a strikingly rich-looking book … The shifts in point of view… are masterfully handled for each section of the novel, with the effect of cinematic … montage and temporal looping, all already previewed, comically, in Morelli's opening seminar. It is such poignancy and humor throughout the novel, working so well together … that raises this novel to the level of a major meditation upon the dance of time that each of us performs until the end." — American Book Review
"Antonioni is famous for making movies in which nothing happens, but plenty of things happen in The Sadness of Antonioni, which is both funny and sad, both a love story and a murder mystery, both an academic novel and a Mafia novel. It is a portrait, at once satirical and affectionate, of an Italian-American film professor devoted to pure form on the screen who finds himself entangled in the messy content of unsparing life. It is a novel I much enjoyed and admired." — Gilberto Perez, Sarah Lawrence College
"By turns hilarious and heart-wrenching, The Sadness of Antonioni follows film professor Hank Morelli from his beginnings as brilliant young turk to his indomitable last days as a gray (though still colorful) eminence, in the process drawing a riveting portrait of contemporary American life, its joys and its puzzlements. A compelling, provocative novel that once again confirms Lentricchia's standing as one of America's most consistently interesting novelists." — Gustavo Pérez Firmat, author of The Havana Habit
"Frank Lentricchia—provocative and profound—is a masterful alchemist at work, here combining anxiety and the academy, absence and memory, sin and redemption, love and desire. The Sadness of Antonioni is a melancholy reflection on nothing less than life, death, beauty, art, and immortality." — Stanislao G. Pugliese, author of Bitter Spring: A Life of Ignazio Silone