Gallo

Alexander Sammartino’s Gallo follows the rise, collapse and strangely qualified redemption of Tom Gallo, an ageing professional bodybuilder who spends most of his life trying to turn his body into proof that he matters. Structured across 2005, 2010 and 2023, the novel presents bodybuilding as art, addiction, faith, self-punishment and performance, while showing how Gallo’s obsessive pursuit of greatness repeatedly injures the people who love him.

The novel briefly opens at the end of Gallo’s life. At fifty-nine, his enormous competition body survives mostly in old footage projected on screens, while his actual body has been ruined by decades of extreme training, drugs and surgery. He dies at home, leaving his bedroom recliner empty and his wife, relatives and friends gathering in mourning. Only afterwards does the narrative return to the younger man who believed that physical perfection could save him from insignificance.

In 2005, Gallo is forty-one and attempting another comeback after a serious quadriceps injury. Once considered a future star, he has become what magazines politely call “a bodybuilder’s bodybuilder”: respected by hard-core fans but largely forgotten by the wider public. He has qualified for Mr. Olympia fourteen times without winning and is now ranked approximately eleventh in the world. Although he speaks as though greatness remains inevitable, he is painfully aware that younger and more symmetrical competitors are replacing him.