Guido Morselli's DISSIPATIO H.G.: The Vanishing (Tr Fredericka Randall)

In the room I visited at the Mayr there was the usual supply of tranquilizers on the night table. I pocketed them. Not because I suffer from insomnia; I had another idea. I feel I have a duty to symbolically resow (yes, resow) the species, following Deucalion. He used stones that grew into human beings. With those meprobamate pills, I hope to propagate a calmer, less quarrelsome breed (compared to the extinct). I thought I might plant them on the Bellevue tennis courts where I watched the Davis Cup’s European zone matches. They ought to produce handsome people, like tennis champions, and like them, inclined toward fair play.

Guido Morselli's last and posthumously published novel, Dissipatio H.G.: The Vanishing is not your typical post-apocalyptic romp. We have no fights over resources, attacks by rival gangs, deadly games of hide-and-seek with the forces that destroyed human civilization. In Dissipatio H.G. (the "H.G." in the title refers, essentially, to the entire Homo genus in scientific nomenclature), the enemy has only ever been internal. Indeed, the story starts with a suicide attempt.

On the eve of his 40th birthday, an unnamed narrator I'm going to call Solo because I'm sick of writing "unnamed narrator" and permutations thereof, resolves to end his life by jumping into a cold underground Alpine lake to drown, but can't quite bring himself to do so and falls asleep on the shore. On the following morning, he wakes, a bit disgusted with himself, and heads back for his home in a tiny Alpine town, only to find that not only is nobody home at his house, but also anywhere in his neighborhood, his town, the neighboring city of Chrysopolis where he works at a newspaper, possibly the entire world, as he eventually and methodically determines by checking out the international airport to which flights no longer arrive and from which none depart. There aren't even the piles of clothing some Christian fundamentalists maintain will be the only traces of the righteous who will be Raptured up just before the End of the World.

But the world as a whole seems to be doing quite all right, except for the livestock, pets and houseplants languishing in otherwise empty human dwellings.

Solo being both a solipcist and a misanthrope -- the kind of guy who refers to Christmas cards as "the annual extortion of greetings" -- he feels fine, building a mocking memorial to the human race out of some abandoned cars and mannequins in downtown Chrysopolis, catching and milking the odd newly wild goat, raiding the well-stocked pantry and refrigerators of a grand hotel* but occasionally smashing a shop window to steal some fruit. "Anarchy and monarchy coexist, now and in me," Solo observes -- or maybe gloats? But he's not quite the gloating kind. "No one possesses me; I possess all."

Solo's last human interaction appears to have been when he passed by an old church's ossuary on his way to his not-suicide. He translated a sign painted over its gate for a tourist: "They were as you and you will be as they are." An interesting parting scene for Solo and the humanity he finds reprehensible for its polluting ways, its materialism, its dullness.

When he returns to the ossuary later, he finds that the human skulls it used to contain have all disappeared as well, which lead this reader to start wondering about cemeteries and columbariums and whatnot but Solo has no fucks to give on this topic so I was left wondering. I got used to it.

It's not through any will to learn, any efforts at playing detective, that Solo starts forming a notion of what occurred while he was up at the lake not ending it all. He just sort of notices things. No cars are clogging the streets or highways to indicate any effort at escape, for instance, and even the beds in the houses he explores still look almost like they're being slept in; the covers are disturbed but not pulled back as they would be by someone getting out of bed. People just disappeared, "vaporized" as Solo calls it, and that was that. 

He finds a journal entry though, penned by a cook in the hotel at almost exactly the stroke of midnight on the night of the disappearance, that suggests that at least some people knew this event was coming and were kind of looking forward to it. Solo being something of a (former) public intellectual type, he's more interested in musing about Freud and the death instinct and other matters philosophical than in the phenomenon the cook's note reveals, though, and soon he's back to his own personal pursuit: observing nature as it starts encroaching in and reclaiming the territory humanity thought was ours, starting with the mold in the cheese in the hotel restaurant and moving on to animals and birds starting to nest in abandoned houses in the city he has always hated. 

Mercifully this novel is quite short. I say mercifully not because the experience of reading it is in any way any more unpleasant than any other post-apocalyptic yarn, nor because Solo is a particularly unpleasant character, but more because it is, in its way, even bleaker than what most of us consider the bleakest entry in the genre, good old Cormac McCarthy's good old The Road.

I have one more book to finish from Radtezky March, though that month is over, and then I think I'm going to go back to free-range reading. The geographic theme was interesting for a while but I've gotten quite a few ARCs and whatnot that I want to get to that won't fit any such. It was a fun idea but I'll not run it into the ground, for all that I already had an Anatolian April half-planned. The Turkish novel I most want to read hasn't even been published in English yet, after all!

*The electricity and phones remain on for the whole story, as many theorists even back then -- the novel was written in 1973, not long before, incidentally, Morselli himself succeeded where Solo failed -- had posited it might, for a while.