Lost Words - Softcover

A combative novel, a multilayered piece of fiction, a triumphant narrative mechanism.--Matteo Giancotti

A gentle, bittersweet, tragicomic rite-of-passage novel translated into lively English by Moore.

Gardini's language is forceful and refined.--Silvia Mazzocchi

Combining elements of comedy and tragedy, Gardini's novel is a call on today's Italy to know its own language, to speak with substance, and to reconsider the relationship between words and meaning--a relationship broken by mass culture. As Leopardi declares, there is in words an exhortation to probe the depths of truth--a calling to believe that culture and education can still save us.--from the citation for the Viareggio Prize

Inside an apartment building on the outskirts of Milan, the working-class residents gossip, quarrel, and conspire against each other. Viewed through the eyes of Chino, an impressionable thirteen-year-old boy whose mother is the doorwoman of the building, the world contained within these walls is tiny, hypocritical, and mean-spirited: a constant struggle. Chino finds escape in reading.One day, a new resident, Amelia Lynd, moves in and quickly becomes an unlikely companion and a formative influence on Chino. Ms. Lynd—an elderly, erudite British woman—comes to nurture his taste in literature, introduces him to the life of the mind, and offers a counterpoint to the only version of reality that he’s known. On one level, Lost Words is an engrossing coming-of-age tale set in the seventies, when Italy was going through tumultuous social changes, and on another, it is a powerful meditation on language, literature, and culture.