Description:
Minor is the desiring body that runs, rises, gravitates towards larger, brighter, more dazzling bodies, that bestows on other bodies the status of suns and planets, fires to be orbited, the reason for everything. There is no center of the universe except the one we invent for ourselves.
Jonathan is twenty years old, gay, and full of life. He's set out to escape the insignificance of his suburban home, to give himself instead and forever to the real city, Milan, where he hopes also to find love.
But when Jonathan finds love in all its messy, complicated, sexy reality, he realizes it's not enough. He has escaped the place and people of his childhood, but can he escape the man raised by those people and in that place, the man he has grown up to be?
The much-anticipated second book by Jonathan Bazzi, the Italian author of the multi-award winning Fever, Minor Bodies is a striking autobiographical novel, a delicious, captivating portrait of love and infatuation: "A self-inflicted lightning bolt, only heavy, joyless -- more like a fist, or a hammer."
Brief description:
Jonathan Bazzi was born in Milan in 1985. They have written for various newspapers and magazines, including Gay.it, Vice, and The Vision. Their first novel, Fever, was hailed as a significant addition to queer literature and won the Sila, Premio Opera Prima, Edoardo Kihlgren, and Bagutta literary prizes.
Review Quotes:
"Bazzi's vivid sophomore novel (after Fever) concerns a young man's search for true love and his life's purpose ... [T]he author succeeds at evoking the narrator's youthful passion and yearning. There's plenty to recommend this confessional monologue."
--Publishers Weekly
Praise for Fever:
"Alternating between powerful recollections of Bazzi's early life in suburban Milan and meditations on their HIV diagnosis, Fever is a stark and searing account of class, crisis, and contemporary queer life; a portrait of what the body weathers and what it remembers."
--Jack Parlett, author of Fire Island
"Bazzi captures the longing, the wounds, and the joys of growing up queer and working class in 1980s Milan--and what it means to recalibrate your world amid the aftershocks of a life-changing diagnosis. I read it in a single sitting."
--Jennifer Down, author of Bodies of Light
"Jonathan Bazzi's Fever promises to shed light on something quite specific, but ends up illuminating infinitely more. Here, in direct and unapologetic prose, brilliantly translated by Alice Whitmore, we are immersed in one man's inner battle to assimilate an HIV diagnosis, yet we are never allowed to lose sight of the wider circumstances that give this battle its distinct emotional configuration: a deprived upbringing, an ill-equipped mother, a neo-fascist father, a suburban wasteland filled with wounded personalities, a precarious livelihood in a modern city, a treacherous online environment, a traumatized queer community, a politically dysfunctional nation. Shifting between anger and rebellion, on the one hand, and tenderness and forgiveness, on the other, Fever grips us first, then terrifies us, then moves us, then urges us, finally, to consider the question, 'Who gets to be well, and why, and how?"
--Gavin McCrea, author of Cells
"Jagged and tender, forthright and sly, this book felt so committed to its fierce, wise vision of the joys and terrors of having a body and living a life. It tells us real things, in a rich voice, with force and passion and insight. I couldn't put it down."
--Ronnie Scott, author of The Adversary
"I couldn't put it down. Jonathan Bazzi's writing is immensely powerful."
--Tomasz Jedrowski, author of Swimming in the Dark
"Every generation, we need new voices to tell us our story. In this harsh, lyrical, and supremely confident memoir, Jonathan Bazzi takes us on a personal journey from violence and disadvantage to the sweet power of queer self-discovery. The writing is terrific--and this is a journey we can all learn from."
--Neil Bartlett, author of Ready To Catch Him Should He Fall and Address Book