Description
Leyla is a feral art-historian, whose pregnancy is put at risk by the re-emergence of childhood traumas. Michael is one of her students. Although shy and solitary in appearance, he is a passionate and duplicitous creature. While working as Leyla's research assistant, he meets and falls in love with Pablo, the inept father of her child. Yet, what unites Leyla and Michael is more than an interest in Pablo. Tommaso Campanella, a maverick seventeenth-century philosopher, whose journal they pored over in order to understand Caravaggio's paintings, exercises a constant influence on their lives. And while Campanella's exile and prison notebooks act as a gateway to seventeenth-century Naples, Leyla and Michael engage in their own flights between New York, Naples, and Paris. In the end, Caravaggio's painting The Seven Works of Mercy reveals itself to be a resonating echo chamber for Leyla, Michael and Tommaso, but also the springboard for a new, more wholesome life.
About the authors
Contributor Notes
Alessandro Giardino is an associate professor of Italian and French literature at Saint Lawrence University and author of Corporeality and Performativity in Baroque Naples: The Body of Naples. He lives between Montreal, Naples, and New York. Joyce Myerson has had an extensive career in academic and literary translation. She is the translator of numerous books, including the award-winning The Big Score by Irene Grazzini.
Editorial Reviews
"Alessandro Giardino's debut novel is an incredible achievement and an exciting read: it takes us on a journey between North America and Europe, between the 2000s and the late sixteenth century, through genders, cultures, and artistic genres, alternating intellectual musings and sensual impulses. The complexity of this concise tale is carried and enhanced by incredibly rich language, as timeless as it is poignant."
professor of art history at Université du Québec à Montréal, Canada
"The Caravaggio Syndrome is the dramatic convergence of five characters in two different centuries, beautifully weaved together. It’s a book about love, resistance, escape, and solitude.”
CNN Senior Producer, award-winning journalist, and author of All She Lost
"While looking to the past, Alessandro Giardino’s inventive mash-up of art history and speculative fiction has a lot to say about our present moment."
author of The Devil and the Dairy Princess: Stories
"In a genre-bending triptych that is both expansive and intimate, Alessandro Giardino paints a vibrant tableau vivant that is a bold yet graceful study of life, love, and art. Smart and sexy, the ambitious work is vividly imaginative and ornate, offering the reader a literary tour of Naples, Paris, and New York, and reminding us about the important lessons we can learn when we look to the past. A talent to watch!"
author of The Geography of Pluto: A Novel
"In this surprising debut novel, Alessandro Giardino's writing moves on the page like the wing of a Baroque angel. It doubles and unfolds revealing the Caravaggesque play of light and shadow that unites the lives of its protagonists."
author of Pier Paolo Pasolini: Performing Authorship
"This novel enchants, seduces, and transports Naples into the echo of different eras, all coming together through the voice of the author as in a play of mirrors where Caravaggio’s appearance is nothing more than another hiding strategy."
professor emerita of anthropology at Université de Montréal, Canada
"In this dreamy meditation, Giardino explores artistic dissatisfaction, personal resilience, and the intricacies of intimate relationships, all connected by the enigmatic allure of Caravaggio’s art...Giardino’s narrative prowess, coupled with Myerson’s fluid translation, makes for a subtle speculative work that lingers in the mind."
Publishers Weekly
"A luminous and very powerful story."
founder & editor-in-chief of Rebel Girls and coauthor of the New York Times bestselling Good Night S
"The Caravaggio Syndrome is a daring and often delicious feat of imagination, as mercurial and masterful as the painter himself, and filled with surprises at every turn. Alessandro Giardino has written a genre-expanding novel sure to please artists, philosophers, Italophiles, and anyone who simply loves a good story."
Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestselling author of Leading Men: A Novel
