Timoteo is a wealthy Roman surgeon who is forced to re-examine his life after his 15-year-old daughter crashes her scooter. As she lies in a coma, Timoteo tells her about an affair he had the year before she was born. In flashbacks, he recounts his relationship with a woman called Italia and probes "the bones of the man" he would like to have been.
He meets the slum-dwelling Italia while hunting for a mechanic in the industrial hinterland on the edge of the city, after his car breaks down on the way to his beach house. She invites him back to her apartment to use her phone. When they arrive, he rapes her.
For several days he waits for the police. Nothing happens, so he returns to Italia's flat and an unlikely relationship begins. For a while he considers walking out on his marriage, but in the end the decision is taken out of his hands when his wife announces she is pregnant.
Since its publication three years ago, Don't Move has enjoyed enormous critical and popular success, winning Italy's most prestigious literary award, the Strega Prize, and selling more than a million copies. A film version starring Penelope Cruz has recently been released and is already being touted as Italy's entry for the Best Foreign Film category at next year's Oscars. Reviewers have compared the novel to the works of Italo Svevo and Alberto Moravia.
Mazzantini is far less stylistically daring than Svevo, but Don't Move contains echoes of Moravia, particularly in its depiction of the comfortable, complacent social world Timoteo inhabits. Having sloughed off his working-class roots, Timoteo has been imprisoned by his success. Rich, respected and married to the beautiful and sophisticated Elsa, he is terrified of losing his hard-won social standing. When he first enters Italia's flat, his disgust at the sight of the threadbare sofa, the blind dog and the shabby decorations is all too believable.
There are many surprising images in this novel. As Timoteo makes love to his pregnant wife, he bears the memory of Italia in his bones. "I could hear the sound of her gloomy footfall," he recalls, "like the steps of an ageing housekeeper who goes round a castle putting out the lights until only darkness remains." But other aspects of the relationship are less convincing, in particular Timoteo's explanation of why he raped Italia: "I did it because I loved her right away and I didn't want to love her; I did it to kill her and I wanted to save her."
Nor is it easy to believe that Italia would instantly fall in love with the stranger who raped her. Mazzantini never explores her thoughts and moods properly. Isolated in her apartment, Italia seems too obviously a literary creation. She appears to have no friends, no close family, and remains conveniently cut off from Timoteo's bourgeois life. When she becomes pregnant, she has an abortion. As her affair with Timoteo drags to a close, she packs her bags for Australia.
Before Italia manages to emigrate, however, she unexpectedly dies, leaving her lover with a corpse on his hands. Timoteo finds a helpful undertaker and returns, unquestioned, to his wife and newborn daughter. Italia is as invisible in death as she had been in life.
For the film version, Penelope Cruz was required to "ugly up" to play Italia - much as Charlize Theron did for the role of a serial-killing prostitute in the film Monster earlier this year. It will be some achievement if Cruz manages to flesh out an oddly insubstantial character.
James Eve is a freelance journalist based in Rome
