Andrea De Carlo made his literary debut in 1981 with the novel Treno di panna (translated as Cream Train, 1987), impressing Italian readers as an original, young voice in contrast to the repetitive formulas and provincialism of the "romanzo medio"--a kind of best-selling novel produced in the 1960s and the 1970s that was generally characterized by fine writing and nostalgic returns to the past. Winner of the Giovanni Comisso Prize, this first work defined De Carlo as the precursor of a new generation of writers--a generation that seemed to challenge and renew the elegiac, autobiographic prose that had distinguished Italian fiction for some twenty years. The originality of his writing, strongly influenced by the cinema, lies in the dry, antirhetorical language he uses to analyze contemporary scenes, characters, and moods as well as in his peculiar perspective which, much like a camera, focuses and brings his subjects into sharp...