Book Description

An aging singer abandons Italy for South America as he struggles with the loss of his stardom, in a Strega Prize–nominated novel by the famed filmmaker. Born on the streets and born singing, Tony Pagoda has had his day. But what a day it was! He had fame, money, women, and talent. He spent his golden years entertaining a flourishing and garishly happy Italy. His success stretched over borders and across the seas. But somewhere things began to go awry, the public’s tastes in music first and foremost. His band is now a shadow of its former self and his life is fraught with mundane but infuriating complications. It’s time to make a clean break with the past. Following a brief tour in Brazil, Tony decides to decamp and make a life for himself in South America. Here, his vision of the world, shaped by those years in which he hobnobbed with Sinatra and enjoyed the adoration of audiences the world over, is under assault. Now that he has abandoned music, the world strikes him as a barren place completely at odds with his understanding of it. Tony’s story is the story of a worldly yet strangely naive man forced to reconcile with life or lose himself entirely. “Tony’s episodic account of his life is a nonstop onslaught of sex, profanity, high-rolling and low-dealing across decades. . . . A furious, ironic, idiosyncratic, unexpurgated torrent, capturing Italian modernity through the lens of a monstrous character.” —Kirkus Reviews “The vignettes that showcase Tony’s moral ineptitude are decidedly entertaining.”—Publishers Weekly