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.

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.

Best Translated Book Nominees: Donatella Di Pietrantonio's A GIRL RETURNED, Translated by Ann Goldsmith

I understand it's a fairly common fantasy among children, to imagine (usually when they're angry with their families) that their parents aren't their Real Parents and that their Real Parents are far richer, kinder, grander people who will buy their long lost children all the toys they want and let them eat candy bars for dinner just as soon as the Real Parents sweep in and claim their suffering darlings and take them away from those wicked people who limit the kids' screen time, make them share with siblings and eat green beans.*

This isn't that story, all though we could call it that-story-adjacent. Let's say it's that fantasy meets the harsh realities of, not just the modern world, but the world as it's really always been but that privilege has allowed a lot of us to pretend isn't anymore. And also, kind of an inversion of that fantasy.

A Girl Returned (L'Armintua in the original Italian) allows an unnamed young girl to share with us what it's like to be unceremoniously ejected from a loving and comfortable home in the city and sent to a miserable hovel near the mountains to live with a Real Family she didn't even know she had, who barely even speak the same language she does,** and don't share many of her assumed to be natural expectations for what a bright young girl in Italy can have for her future.

The mystery of why this has happened is a constant pull on the narrative, and we do get an eventual explanation for it, but this isn't the focus of the novel, either. But so, what is?

For me, it's two things: what it's like for the narrator to discover she has siblings and to suddenly be thrust into close quarters (as in sharing a bedroom) with them, and how the author and translator can convey, just via the very careful deployment of articles and possessive pronouns, how our narrator's perception of her Former Family and her Real Family are shifting from scene to scene. That may sound boring, but it isn't, and I'm pretty sure this book would still be a highly engaging read if the reader wasn't paying attention to those little parts of speech, as they are grace notes rather than The Point, but since I noticed this fairly early on and found myself really interested to see if it was just my imagination based on a few flukes or something deliberately done for effect, I found this aspect of the novel fascinating.

Where this is really interesting is how our narrator interacts with her two mothers, the one who raised her into her early teens, and the one who gave birth to her. For a long time, she refers to the first as "my" mother and the second simply as "the mother" of the Real Family, with all of the emotional distancing that implies and more (the relationship is difficult and often borders on hostile, even after the narrator comes better to understand the circumstances of the Real Family's mother's life and stops trying to fight her new circumstances). As the various and colorful members of the Real Family come into focus for her, then and only then are their names revealed, first her sister Adriana, just a little younger than she, then baby brother Giuseppe***, fun and disturbingly attractive eldest brother Vincenzo and another older brother, Sergio.****  All the kids share a bedroom full of rickety furniture, dirty bedclothes and many other signifiers of poverty; to the narrator's credit, she doesn't dwell on her disgust, as first she is just too shocked to register anything properly and by the time the shock has faded not only has her little sister latched on to her tightly (as the cover art depicts, the two share a narrow mattress and sleep head to toe, continuing the practice even after the narrator's guilt tripping Former Family buy them bunk beds, even though Adriana is a persistent bed wetter), but sister and the RF mother have thrust responsibility for a lot of baby Giuseppe's care on our narrator, who has been brought up with enough decently not to take out her dismay and disgust on a helpless infant.

Meanwhile, her relationship with Vincenzo, who is secretly the real man of the family, providing better for them with his odd jobs and shady dealings (about which more in a moment, and TW for some othering/racism when we get there) than the mostly absent father does, is constantly on the verge of becoming inappropriate, especially since he still sleeps in the kids' bedroom and does what young men do in the night, until Circumstances Intervene, just saving this book from developing a major ick factor, but it still had a minor one that some readers might find not so minor and that lies in the descriptions of the shady company Vincenzo keeps, called in this text not Roma but Gypsies, and pretty much every stereotype about them gets an airing here. I suspect this is deliberate, whether on the author's or the translator's part isn't clear, to convey our narrator's perception of the described people (her Former Father was a kind of policeman, and had a policeman's stereotypical tendency to stereotype others, and there is a minor educational story arc of our narrator taking baby steps toward unlearning the unconscious attitudes she picked up from him, but in the process, well, there's some casual othering some readers might not be willing to forgive in the service of a very minor arc in the novel).

I love books like this, that not only demand I empathize with the unfamiliar experiences and point of view of the character but also change my attitudes about the characters around her as her own do. A Girl Returned achieves this with what appears like effortlessness, but I suspect it was actually a lot of work. And it pays off.

*I never had it, but I happen to have done a pretty decent job of picking parents. Who are still married to each other after more than 50 years and were just cuddling on my sofa while we watched TV tonight. I know I'm astonishingly lucky and I don't take it for granted.
**(I'm not sure if this is a matter of accent or dialect but I suspect it is accent; I'm okay with not being sure because this means that author Donatella Di Pietrantonio and/or her translator into English, Ann Goldsmith, did not burden me with any attempt whatsoever to show me in dialogue how differently the Real Family and their neighbors speak from our narrator's Former Family. The narrator mentions a few times that they talk very differently, and that is fine. This is not poverty porn or armchair anthropology or anything like so tedious. There's much more interesting stuff going on.
***Interestingly, the kids born after her become people to her considerably faster than her older siblings or her biological mother and her husband (who, unless I misread, might not actually be the narrator's father but is at least Giuseppe's father?).
****Sergio never really emerges as a person and, to be honest, might not actually be a sibling; it wasn't clear to me but ultimately didn't matter.