The Women I Love by Francesco Pacifico

Published in Italy in 2018; published in translation by Farrar, Straus and Giroux on December 7, 2021

Through Marcello, the narrator of The Women I Love, Francesco Pacifico tells us that the novel is an “experiment in how to talk about women.” Talking about women might be easier than talking to them, a skill Marcello has not mastered. He mansplains, even to the extent of telling women what they are feeling. He is more in touch with his own feelings than the feelings of the women he loves, but Marcello’s feelings are difficult to understand. For no obvious reason, he tells us that he has lost “every feeling, every certainty that went into the experience of loving and being loved.” Marcello’s drama stems from jealousy, a strange reaction in light of the ease with which Marcello betrays Barbara, the woman he marries during the course of the novel. The Women I Love has been described as a parody of toxic masculinity in literature, and perhaps toxic is the best way to characterize Marcello’s experiment. Fortunately, the toxin is amusingly weak, much like Marcello.

Marcello is a poet turned editor. Marcello lives with Barbara in Rome and, early in the novel, is splitting his work life between the Milan and Rome offices of his employer. He begins his story with Eleonora, a lover he apparently took in the belief that having a girlfriend on the side is a duty of Italian men. Marcello tells Eleonora that their relationship is based on an excess of passion, not on anything that could be the foundation of a marriage. Still, Marcello seems surprised (or at least distressed) when Eleonora decides it is time to move on. Having convinced himself that Eleonora used him to get her editing job, Marcello naturally believes that Eleonora slept with the boss to get more prestigious editing assignments than Marcello is receiving. In reality, Eleonora simply cares about the content of books more than Marcello, whose is more concerned with promoting books than improving them.

Marcello tells us that Eleonora is the only one of his loves he doesn’t understand. It seems clear, however, that Marcello has made little effort to understood any of the women in his life. Even as Marcello describes the women in his memories, he wonders whether he understands women well enough to write about them. He addresses the male perception that women are incomprehensible by referring to writers like Philip Roth: “In these great males novels, men are restless, they make mistakes, they struggle, and the novel is a pinball machine where the women are bumpers that ring and light up when touched — they’re so striking, so crucial, that they seem like main characters, but they’re really only a function of the man’s little steel ball.”

When he thinks about women, Marcello wonders if he is only rating them from one to ten, judging them as if he were at a cow auction. No reader will accuse Marcello of being woke when it comes to women, although he might deserve credit for recognizing the superficiality of his interactions with them. As a writer, he claims to be making an effort to give them a serious role, to portray them as something more than background characters who support or condemn men. He wants to feel “truly attached to them and stop feeling that they’re only floating shadows.” That is a worthy goal for a writer even if Pacifico addresses it in parody.

Each chapter in The Women I Love is devoted to one of Marcello’s loves. At varying times in his life, Marcello’s thoughts of Eleonora and Barbara are passionate. His relationships with his sister, his mother, and his sister-in-law are platonic, although he’s certain that all men view their brothers’ wives as sex objects (a belief that, in my experience, is not remotely true). He also objectifies a friend’s live-in girlfriend, a woman who occasionally sleeps with his sister. Marcello feels like an idiot for taking so long to realize that his sister is a lesbian, a symptom of his failure to pay much attention to women at all unless he wants to screw them. Marcello gives us biographical details of his mother but then admits he doesn’t know her: “my language is muddled, imprecise — it’s all hearsay.” Although she doesn’t get her own chapter, Marcello’s grandmother also receives some love.

Marcello tells the reader that The Women I Love is “a novel of my memories.” True to its post-modernist form, Marcello speaks directly to the reader, occasionally explaining his textual revisions and stylistic choices, his decision to conceal certain names or details to avoid disturbing friendships after publication (“the enzyme of fiction allows for this: first confess, then conceal”). Sometimes he questions the inaccuracy of his memory; other times he discusses Italian literature.

The Women I Love has nothing approaching a plot, although it does follow Marcello through his late 30s as he gets married, separates, repeatedly changes jobs and his residence, and makes a wrong-footed attempt to rekindle a relationship with Eleonora, perhaps committing a sexual assault by refusing to acknowedge the word "stop." The novel ends abruptly, Marcello apparently having exhausted his observations of the women he loves. The reader might regard some of those observations as insightful. Other observations might just be intended to shock. Marcello rejects the common view that relationship success requires hard work. “What a bourgeois crock of shit,” he writes, “the couple as a business venture, where every day you roll up the shutter door, then roll up your sleeves.” Marcello also rejects the idea of women saving men because, in novels written by men, “a woman who saves someone is a woman who winds up punished on the following page; the role of savior that men apply to woman in some narrative form is our wooden horse, concealing our desire to penetrate and destroy.” The value of The Women I Love is its ability to provoke thoughts or conversation about nuggets like these, regardless of whether the reader ultimately agrees with or lampoons Marcello’s conclusions. For that reason, the novel might be a good book club selection, particularly if the book club has both male and female participants.

RECOMMENDED