conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What could be a title for a book about Robert, American, Lisa with the genre: Literature & Fiction, Literary?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: A title for this book could be 'The Girl on the Via Flaminia'
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the first five paragraphs for this book?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The Girl on the Via Flaminia
  Hayes was born in London in 1911, but was raised and educated in New York. After leaving college, he was taken on as a reporter for both the Daily News and The New York American. He began his serious writing career as a poet and had his poems accepted by the New Yorker and several other prestigious magazines. During the Second World War, he served with the U.S. Special Services in Europe and was stationed in Rome in 1943. It was there that he befriended the film directors Roberto Rossellini, Luigi Zampa, and Vittorio de Sica. He fell in love with the Italian language, which he soon learned to speak fluently. He was given an Oscar nomination, along with the young Federico Fellini, for his work on the script of Rossellini's important second movie, Paisà, and he also contributed dialogue to De Sica's The Bicycle Thief, for which he was uncredited.
  He returned to America in 1945. For the next three decades he was in fairly constant demand as a screenwriter in Hollywood. His credits include Fred Zinneman's Teresa (1951), for which he received his second Academy Award nomination, and two films by the great Fritz Lang—Clash by Night (1952) and Human Desire (1955), a remake of Jean Renoir's classic La Bête Humaine. A poem he wrote about the folk singer and socialist militant Joe Hill, who was executed in Utah in 1915, provided the lyrics for the song made famous by Joan Baez and later inspired Bo Widerberg's over-lyrical biopic.
  Alfred Hayes's third novel, and the first of the quartet that should be retrieved from obscurity, is (1949). As its title suggests, it is set in Rome, and the girl in question is Lisa, whose friend Nina, a successful whore, persuades her to share a room with a frustrated American soldier named Robert. The room is in an apartment on Via Flaminia owned by the Pulcini family. Signora Adele Pulcini is the most respectable kind of pimp, providing wine and cheese and pasta to the English and American officers who spend their leisure hours and their money in her kitchen. The time is 1944, and the newly liberated city is filled with men desperate for sex. The Roman women are just as desperate for money and food, and prostitution has become almost a regular way of life. Yet this novel is concerned with chastity and the beginnings of love. Lisa and Robert have to pretend to be married. They sleep in the same double bed, and sleeping is all they are able to do. Lisa makes it clear from the outset that she despises herself for being where she is, in the company of a man who assumes he can pay for his gratification with an abundance of lire. The scenes between the disdainful Lisa and the genuinely sensitive Robert are like a series of courtly dances—one step forwards, two steps backwards. They both lose their tempers, and they both try to explain the difficult position they're in.
  At last he convinces her of his abiding love, it seems, and at last she responds to his attentiveness. But the novel doesn't end there, with the romantic battle won. Hayes is a master of the narrative that halts or leaps forward to the future rather than concludes. The last two pages of are acutely painful in their uncertainty.
  In Love is even orter than its predecessor, with a smaller cast and a narrower focus. It takes as its epigraph the opening lines of George Herbert's "Love": "Love bade me welcome; yet my soul drew back, / Guilty of dust and sin." The story is told by a man in a hotel bar in New York to an attractive younger woman he has recently met. His chat-up line is unusual, in that it rarely shows him in a favourable light. The man is in his early forties and is still smarting from the pain he was made to endure in the last months of an unhappy love affair.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is five more paragraphs?
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: Ugo looked at them. "Excuse my son," he said. There was a painful silence. "When the Germans were here," he said, "I hid him—in the cellar. It was because of the arrests, they were arresting all the young who had deserted... and sending them north to the factories in Austria, and to the labor camps... He was two months in that cellar and I would bring him food." He looked at them, as though possibly they would understand this: the two months in the cellar. "To live with fear, and with hatred, is bad... one changes because of it, and yet, when one has only one son, what else can one do? He's so changed... Always," he said, "when I went to the cellar, Antonio would ask me: where are the Americans, are they close, why do they stay so long at Anzio? It was difficult for him—a soldier, young, and part of a defeated army—and then, to live like that, for two months, in a cellar..."
  He did not finish. He means, Robert thought, to emerge into this, to come out of the cellar finally into this.
  The Englishman stood up. "Come on," he said. "Let's go out into the garden and see the fireworks. Listen to them."
  From Porto Bardia to Tripoli. Between Barce and Derna the cliffs dropping to the sea. At El Aden the tanks burning.
  The highway, and on one side of the highway, the desert, and on the other the mountains, and behind them, the English.
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: Reverse the sentences.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: The highway, and on one side of the highway, the desert, and on the other the mountains, and behind them, the English.. At El Aden the tanks burning. Between Barce and Derna the cliffs dropping to the sea."
  From Porto Bardia to Tripoli. Listen to them. "Let's go out into the garden and see the fireworks. "Come on," he said.
  The Englishman stood up. He means, Robert thought, to emerge into this, to come out of the cellar finally into this."
  He did not finish... Always," he said, "when I went to the cellar, Antonio would ask me: where are the Americans, are they close, why do they stay so long at Anzio? It was difficult for him—a soldier, young, and part of a defeated army—and then, to live like that, for two months, in a cellar... one changes because of it, and yet, when one has only one son, what else can one do? He's so changed... "To live with fear, and with hatred, is bad." He looked at them, as though possibly they would understand this: the two months in the cellar. He was two months in that cellar and I would bring him food... and sending them north to the factories in Austria, and to the labor camps... It was because of the arrests, they were arresting all the young who had deserted. "When the Germans were here," he said, "I hid him—in the cellar. There was a painful silence. "Excuse my son," he said.Ugo looked at them
conversations.from: human
conversations.value: What is the last two paragraphs? Start with the sentence 'When he shouted "Lisa!" into the fog and the darkness, they shrugged their shoulders and said, "Eh, the soldati '.
conversations.from: assistant
conversations.value: When he shouted "Lisa!" into the fog and the darkness, they shrugged their shoulders and said, "Eh, the soldati... the trouble is always with women."
  Poet, screenwriter, and novelist, Alfred Hayes, was one of the most important American writers of the 1950s and 1960s. Twice nominated for Academy Awards, he wrote films for Fellini, De Sica (The Bicycle Thief), Rossellini (Paisan), Zinnemann, and Fritz Lang (Clash By Night). His novels include In Love and My Face for the World to See, and his poem Joe Hill was set to music by Earl Robinson and made famous by Joan Baez. Hayes died in 1985.