The Bedroom

Poetry. Bilingual Editon. Translated from the Italian by Luigi Bonaffini. THE BEDROOM [La camera da letto] is Bertolucci's best-known work, so popular that the poet once read it to television viewers on a seven-hour program. It is a narrative poem that traces the history of the poet's family across seven generations with directness, precision and attention to everyday details, major events and fantastic surprises. Paolo Lagazzi writes in his introduction: "THE BEDROOM is a sort of a multi-novel, or a distillation of very diverse narrative forms and intuitions: a Bildungsroman and fairytale, an epoch novel, a novel-chronicle, a dramatic novel and a picaresque novel. An experimental work in the most authentic sense of the word..." "Nothing of time's essence escapes or is neglected by the author's ravenous sensibility, no less active in recording the multiple places in which existence rests (the city and the countryside, the sea and the plane, the Po river and the Maremma) in an exuberant display of forms, lights, perspectives, tonalities."—Luigi Ferrara