A Previous Life
by Edmund White
Bloomsbury Publishing
Ruggero Castelnuovo is a Sicilian aristocrat and a world famous harpsichord player in his seventies. Married to American writer Constance who is 40 years younger, he breaks a leg while heli-skiing in Switzerland and the two of them decide to write their respective sexual memoirs and read them out to each other.
Best known for A Boy’s Own Story (1982), Edmund White is an award winning and prolific writer whose metafiction draws hugely from his own life. This ‘paterfamilias of queer literature’ is now 82, has lived with HIV since 1985 and survived multiple strokes and a heart attack.
The story is set in 2050, but there appears to be no difference between this future setting and our present. People still go to museums and theatres and connect on Facebook. White is a character in Ruggero’s past and he seems to be thinking about his legacy as a writer, hoping he won’t be “a writer no one’s ever heard of except for a few old queens.”
Ruggero admits to being a ‘happy narcisist’ who is very proud of his large uncut penis he has named Bruce. Ruggero is based on White’s real life friend Giuseppe Gullo, a Sicilian oncologist who plays the harpsichord, but we have to take White’s word for Gullo’s physical attributes. Although he had only married once, Ruggero’s life was crammed with heterosexual, homosexual, affairs including one with White when he was a decrepit eighty year-old.
Constance has had two brief marriages but has see-sawed from men to women with each disappointment. She is now the young person in a relationship with the older Ruggero who has tried to keep in shape, as his deteriorating body would challenge his strong antiquated beliefs on what it means to be masculine.
As Ruggero and Constance share their secrets, their memoirs cause them to reflect on their polyamorous desires, their relationship and their future together … or not together. At the beginning of the exercise, Ruggero did question whether their relationship would survive.
Lezly Herbert
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