Bright Monday is a reflective, elegant, memory-driven novel about ageing, old desire, marriage, literary reputation, dogs, translation, AIDS, Covid, and the way the past can return at the exact moment when one thinks it has become harmless. Its narrator is Adam, an American writer and professor in late middle age. He is married to Robert, has been with him for twenty years, and is spending three months in Milan translating a hugely successful Italian novel, The Anchoress, by his friend Valeria. The novel he is translating was published under the pseudonym Marina, and much of Bright Monday is also about writers trying to escape the versions of themselves that reputation has trapped them inside.
The present-day action takes place mostly over Easter weekend in 2022. Adam is in Milan at the end of his stay, grieving the recent death of his and Robert’s terrier, half-dreading his return to America, and obsessively checking email and messages from students, family, political organizations, the university, and Robert. He has been staying first in an Airbnb and then, after a brief archival trip to Paris, in a mediocre former brothel converted into a hotel. The television in the lobby silently shows news of the Russian invasion of Ukraine, making his academic anxieties feel both absurd and inescapable.
On Easter Sunday morning, Adam goes out looking for breakfast, discovers that nearly every bar is closed, and walks into a park. In the dog area he suddenly sees Francesco, whom he has not seen for thirty-two years. Francesco is there with his Welsh terrier, Mino, and a little girl Adam at first assumes is his daughter but then realizes is his granddaughter, Chiara. Mino runs to Adam with a ball, forcing the encounter. Francesco recognizes Adam immediately and greets him warmly, almost casually, as if their past were not traumatic. He invites Adam to lunch with him and his wife, Natalia, who, Adam is stunned to learn, still lives with him in Milan.
