Giacomo Sartori's BUG (tr by Frederika Randall)

OK, given my known and recently expressed proclivities, you all might be forgiven for thinking that this is yet another bit of entomologically-themed speculative fiction in translation, but you're (mostly) wrong this time: the bug in the title of Giacomo Sartori's Bug refers more to an error in computer code* than to an arthopod. Mostly.

It is also the name of an entity that befriends our narrator, a nameless (again!) boy growing up in a singularly unique family with a father whose cover job is analyzing data for Nutella but whose actual job is terrorist hunting**; a Buddhist mother who is also a beekeeper and very much what holds his weird family together; a brother they call IQ in real life but is better known in cyberspace as Robin Hood and is a 13-year-old hacker god who is secretly building a robot and whose expertise daddy passes off as his own to not-Nutella; and a pot-smoking grandfather who used to be an anarchist but is now an amateur naturalist who studies earthworms and other nematodes.

Our hero, the baby of the family, is deaf, and his deafness is poorly accommodated at school, where no one even makes an effort to let him lip read, let alone learn to sign to him; he's just expected magically to keep up anyway (there is an incompetent teaching aid assisgned to help him but that person never makes an actual appearance in the book). The resulting misunderstandings, and the boy's poor judgment as to how best to make himself understood (by biting people) have left the poor kid with a reputation for behavioral problems even before the fateful day when his mother and closest confidante gets into a terrible car accident and winds up in a coma.

The book, therefore, is the boy dictating to a family friend what amounts to a blow-by-blow account of his life as addressed to his hospitalized and unconscious mother, but kind of played for laughs.

Meanwhile an entity starts contacting him, just as hilarious pranks begin to manifest at the expense of the family's adversaries. The entity doesn't outright claim credit for them -- at first it can't because its understanding of language is too poor to convey abstract thought, even to one such as our boy, but later on when its mastery is assured, it still plays coy about how the malignant neighbor/landlord's smart sprinkler system suddenly started spraying water on all of his fruit trees in the dead of winter, producing a rapturously beautiful effect the boy describes to us in lyrical prose until the weight of the frozen water starts snapping all of the trees' branches, or how a teacher who has made our boy especially misterable at school suddenly has a fake dating profile on a site for explicit golddiggers, or...

The pranks are all cybernetic in nature, so it's easy to guess the nature of the entity pretty early on, unless one has never read science fiction before, but that doesn't stop a rather charming relationship from developing, one in which our boy takes some solace as his world continues to fall apart.

If this all sounds familiar, well, it is, but despite that the book has some surprises for us. I was dead certain that BUG was going to turn out to be a certain thing that would end up doing a certain other thing, but that's not at all what happened, to my delight, for instance.

And it's a book that's just fun to read. The combination of Sartori's sense of humor and wonder and Frederika Randall's taste leaves us with a lot of vividly weird language and startling metaphors to ponder. For instance, late in the book our boy describes his return to school one day thusly:

When I got to school I was preparing to imitate a piece of bric-a-brac nobody pays any attention to, like those birds that peck away on wall clocks.

The weirdness is also on brilliant display in the chapter titles, all of which are directly quoted in the text of their chapters. "Hunkered down like an alligator in the mud of the cushions," "Words tied up in the white sheet of silence," "A corpse bought on Amazon" and my favorite, "Nutella isn't a cyber-weapon." Sure thing, young'un. That's why they have your father on their IT payroll... 

*Though of course that term derives from an incident when an actual insect messed up an early computer back in the days when computers were things that filled entire rooms.

**I imagine him as very much a colleague of those lovable misfits in the short-lived but much-missed data-thriller drama, Rubicon, and so imagine him as being played by James Badge Dale.