The Worst Intentions

by Alessandro Piperno

Translated from the Italian

by Ann Goldstein

Italy’s leading daily newspaper called The Worst Intentions, “a dangerous novel.” Right from the title, wrote La Repubblica, this daring book “proclaims the furiously bellicose and iconoclastic spirit that drives it.”

Daniel is the thirty-three-year-old heir to the dappled fortunes of the Sonninos, a wealthy Jewish-Italian family whose staggering rise and fall during the years spanning the end of WW2 and the beginning of the twenty-first century provides the richly colored backdrop to this remarkable tragi-comedy. Daniel has inherited his grandfather’s extravagant passions and his father’s servility, as well as the excesses of his social class. He is also victim of a crippling infatuation with Gaia, fountainhead of his erotic fantasies and fetishes. This novel will be justly compared to the works of Philip Roth and Saul Bellow. An audacious, sumptuous novel about ritual and liberty, love and war, sex and betrayal, set in the opulent neighborhoods of contemporary Rome

(From Publisher).

Alessandro Piperno was born in Rome in 1972. He is a professor of French literature at Rome’s Tor Vergata University. In 2000, he published his non-fiction book, Proust Anti-Jew, dividing his readers into staunch supporters and fierce detractors. His debut novel, The Worst Intentions, was an instant bestseller and won the Campiello Prize for first novels.

Considered by many critics as the best literary debut of 2005 with nearly 200,000 copies sold in a few months, the books won the prestigious premium Campiello Prize.