is 15 and a half and a more talented violin student than Ernesto. They decide to be friends. Composition and publication Mindful of how his treatment of same-sex relations would offend most readers in Italy in the 1950s, Saba did not plan to publish this work. He wrote: "I knew as soon as I'd written the first sentence that this wouldn't be for publication." He allowed only a select few to read his manuscript. He read selections to other residents of the Roman asylum where he was living when he started writing in 1953. Still struggling against depression, he moved home to Trieste. When he shared a few pages by mail with his daughter Linuccia, he included "paranoid instructions" for protecting and returning the draft. He planned to continue the story through Ernesto's adolescence to his discovery of poetry, which would be his life's work, and his first experience of love. When Saba completed four episodes, concluding with Ernesto's confession to his mother, he wrote a one-page explanation for the reader that interrupts the narrative. He titled it "Almost a Conclusion". He described his inability to continue writing: "Add to those pages, Ernesto's breakthrough to his true calling, and you would in fact, have the complete story of his adolescence. Unfortunately, the author is too old, too weary and embittered to summon up the strength to write all that." He wrote only a fifth episode that recounts the violin recital and the beginning of Ernesto's friendship with Ilio. In August 1953 he ordered the destruction of his manuscript and the novel was left unfinished at his death in 1957. His daughter Linuccia arranged for its publication by Einaudi in 1975. Carcanet Press published an English translation by Mark Thompson in 1987, with a cover image in saturated colors of a woman walking along the seacoast taken from a painting by a Trieste artist. It received wider distribution in 1989 in editions by Paladin in London and HarperCollins in New York. A The New York Times critic noted that Saba's "forthrightness ... would certainly have raised eyebrows" in the 1950s but that "Anyone reading these scenes today, however, will probably find their sexually explicit content redeemed by the unfailingly affectionate tone." New York Review Books published a translation by Estelle Gilson in 2017. The Irish writer Aidan Higgins classed its treatment of adolescent sexuality with the work of an earlier generation