In The House on Moon Lake Francesca Duranti creates a character who withdraws from life through literature. On a literal level Fabrizio Garrone moves forward in time. He is dissatisfied with his life, discovers an unknown novel, turns it into a best-seller, goes to the scene of the events that inspired the novel, and comes to a strange end. But this chronological progress contrasts with the metaphoric level of the book in which Fabrizio's life mirrors that of a novel. It mirrors, in fact, the life of the love story he discovers. That book is entitled The House on Moon Lake. Thus, at the most obvious level, the story of Fabrizio is identified with the story in the book he finds.
In the career of a love story, one written from the author's own feelings and experience, the writer, involved in an affair, first has the inspiration to write, his ongoing experience provides him with the material for the book, then the book is written, reviewed (or evaluated), sold (obtained), read, and placed in libraries. Fabrizio's life reverses this process. He starts out in a library, reads about the book, steals (obtains) the book, publishes the book, becomes obsessed by the woman in the book, returns to live where the book took place, has an affair, and dwindles away as the result of the affair--to the point where he is about to be extinguished. Thus, some time after Duranti's novel has ended he will disappear (die) and there will be the same nothingness to his life as there was to the love story's life before its author had his inspiration. Thus, Duranti's House on Moon Lake becomes Oberhofer's Das Haus am Mondsee in reverse.
Fabrizio is a man with no sense of himself. Torn up by the roots from his earlier, protected life, he is lost in the wider world. His retreat from life gathers force as, ironically, he is supposed to be making his strongest advance into it. Fabrizio does not fool himself when he conceives of his retreat as an...