Life In Peacetime

Francesco Pecoraro

Translated by Antony Shugaar

Forthcoming

 

6 x 9 inches, 664pp. April 2018

ISBN : 9780857424822

Rs  999.00 (HB)
$35.00 (HB)
£22.00 (HB)

Buy (HB)

When Life in Peacetime opens, on May 29, 2015, engineer Ivo Brandani is 69 years old. He’s disillusioned and angry—but morbidly attached to life. As he makes a day-long trip home from his job in Sharm el Sheik reconstructing the coral reefs of the Red Sea using synthetics, he reflects on both the brief time he sees remaining ahead and on everything that has happened already in his life to which he can never quite resign himself. We see his slow bureaucratic trudge as a civil servant, long summer vacations on a Greek island, his twisted relationship with his first boss, the turmoil and panic attacks he faced during the student uprisings in 1968 that pushed him away from philosophy and into engineering and his fearful childhood as a postwar evacuee.

 

A close-up portrait of an ordinary existence, Life in Peacetime offers a new look at the postwar era in Italy and the fundamental contradictions of a secure, middle-class life.

Francesco Pecoraro's first book, published in 2007, was a collection of short stories titled Dove credi di andare which received the Premio Berto and the Premio Napoli. Life in Peacetime is his first novel and has won the Premio Viareggio and has been named as a finalist for the Premio Strega. 

 

Antony Shugaar has translated four Premo Strega-winning novels, nearly 40 novels for Europa Editions and two books in the Norton COllected Works of Primo Levi. He has translated six episodes of Paolo Sorrentino's The Young Pope and regularly translated articles from the French and the Italian for the New York Review of Books. He has published extensively as a journalist, largely on subjects related to Italy and the Mediterranean region. 

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