Marcello, an editor and poet, is on the brink of his forties. Like everyone in his life, including his sister-in-law, he’s writing a novel. This novel. This novel will be about women. Love. Growing older. Maybe even taking responsibility. But unfortunately for Marcello, the women in his life resist definition. They flit and flicker constantly between archetype and actuality: sirens and saviors, subordinates and savants, vixens and villains.

I enjoyed this book! I was blown away by how much I liked the main character even tho he was a jerk.. That is the power of Francesco's writing. I love how it wasn't just about women he was IN love with, but about women he has loved in general throughout his life. He spoke to the many forms of love we have for the women in our lives.

This book had a great voice. Some of the chapters gripped me more than others. Irene and My Mother chapters were really captivating, but Barbara dragged for me. This book was good, but not super memorable; not one I'll come back to and read over and over.

I seem to be on a roll with Italian novels! Such great writing. It’s got a very meta/ post-modern style… the main character being an author writing a novel, that is THIS novel. It could have been really pretentious yet the definitely unreliable narrator, manages to be just self-aware and honest enough, to remain compelling. Each of the five sections focus on significant women in his life - His on-and-off-again lover, his wife, his sister, his sister-in-law and his mother. And these women just come alive off the page, so vibrant and fascinating, so his toxic masculinity is over-shadowed.,Whilst plot is scarce, the writing is so gorgeous, I couldn’t stop reading….

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.

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I tried but I just didn't like Marcello. I wanted to tell him to grow up, among other things. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. I know I'm going to be the odd one out for this literary fiction but I just DNF.

This is a fascinating glimpse into how different life is in Italy. It is completely normal to have a mistress. It is usual to life at home as an adult, and not to own your own home. Marcello, our anti-hero, is passionate and thoughtful and also not much of a grown-up. He drifts from situation to situation, not having much of a plan. Marcello seems to have charmed life, never running out of money and always getting a new job when he needs to. Ultimately, his existence is pretty sad. He is loved by beautiful women and doesn't know what to do. Poor Marcello.

Francesco Pacifico's The Women I Love is a wonderful new addition to to the world of literary fiction. It's postmodernism, but somehow remains unpretentious-- sort of hearkening back to David Foster Wallace, with its meta approach and "me too" era commentary, all delivered with a humility and frankness that is relatable and keeps it from being obnoxious. I love the push-pull of the narrator's thoughts and his general sense of awareness-- of himself, of his friends, family, and lovers, of society, and even, of his blind spots/lack of awareness when it comes to all the aforementioned. He's candid, narratively naked, in such a way that the novel feels almost as if it's nonfiction. While there's little in the way of plot, as is to be expected of literary fiction, there's a certain freshness that when combined with the location and dynamic characters, I think could see it cross over into a more mainstream readership.

Thanks to Netgalley and FSG for the ebook. I thought this might be a long litany of female lovers, but the author means the women who are most important in his life. Elenora, a co-worker at the publishing house where they edit fiction, is his last big affair before he finally commits to his longtime girlfriend, Barbara. He does commit to Barbara, but arguments soon begin and he moves in with his brother and his wife, Daniella, until he has a falling out with her and then moves in with his estranged sister Irene. Irene came out as a lesbian and has been ignored by their parents. When he reconnects with Irene it doesn’t take long for her to become one of his favorite people in the world once more. The final chapter brings many of these characters together in the author’s mind as this chapter examines his mother.