Andrea De Carlo

Andrea De Carlo (born 11 December 1952) is an Italian novelist. He has published almost two dozen novels, many of which have been translated.

Biography

Andrea De Carlo grew up in Milan. He attended the liceo classico Giovanni Berchet (which appears in the initial chapters of Due di Due); then he graduated in modern literature, with a degree in contemporary history. He worked for a time as a photographer, initially as second assistant to Oliviero Toscani, and then doing portraits and reportage on his own.

He travelled widely in the United States, living first in Boston, then New York City, Santa Barbara and Los Angeles, where he did odd jobs and taught Italian. Then he moved on to Australia, staying in Sydney and Melbourne. In this period, he wrote two novels intended as "exercises of style", which he decided not to publish.

He settled back in Italy, in Milan and Rome and then in the countryside near Urbino. In 1981, the publishing house Einaudi published his first novel, Treno di Panna, which he had already written in English under the title "Cream Train". Italo Calvino wrote an introduction. A movie adapted from the book would later be produced. Calvino explained that the book was a successful attempt "to describe the internal turmoil of a young man of our time through an external projection", in the words of critic G. d'Angelo, but d'Angelo panned the book in a 1982 review; he found only "emptiness" in the book, along with lexical and grammatical problems and a "flat, wooden style".