"Nothing of time's essence escapes or is neglected by the author's ravenous sensibility, no less active in recording the multiple places in which existence rests (the city and the countryside, the sea and the plane, the Po river and the Maremma) in an exuberant display of forms, lights, perspectives, tonalities."
Luigi Ferrara
"The Bedroom is a sort of a multi-novel, or a distillation of very diverse narrative forms and intuitions: a Bildungsroman and fairytale, an epoch novel, a novel-chronicle, a dramatic novel and a picaresque novel. An experimental work in the most authentic sense of the word, The Bedroom has enriched Bertolucci's creative journey with an absolute originality and, by opening poetry to the sweep of the novel, has set a style in Italy, offering many poets tired of the residual effects of Symbolism and anxious to find the wide scope of the epic, an extraordinary alternative model, an obligatory point of reference."
Paolo Lagazzi, from the Introduction.
"In The Bedroom, diversification is characterized by rhythmic unpredictability, an extremely changeable verse of every size, never bound to any preconceived metrical pattern, that blends memory and imagination in each passage of the book. If the notion of a narrative poem forms a subtle thread that unites the various 'sequences,' as the author calls the poetic units in each chapter containing a single narrative experience, the task of poetry is instead to enrich and brighten the texture of every line, making it memorable and unique... English speakers reading the translation are asked, as are Italian speakers reading the original poem, to find their way through the sinuous and ever fascinating spirals of Bertolucci's syntax, with the assurance that the journey will be a rewarding one, filled with many surprises..."
Luigi Bonaffini, from the Translator's Note.
