In 1973, shortly after his last novel, like the others before it, was rejected by publishers, the Italian writer Guido Morselli shot himself in the head and died. He left several rejection letters on his desk, and a short note that read, “I bear no grudges.” It was the kind of gesture one of his protagonists might have performed—a show of ironic detachment that belied a deep and obvious pain. Morselli was sixty years old. Before returning to his family’s home in Varese and ending his life, he had been living in near-isolation for two decades, on a small property in Lombardy, near the Swiss-Italian border. There he tended to the land, made wine, and wrote books that faced diminishing odds of publication. The last one that he finished tells the story of an apocalyptic event in which all of humanity suddenly vanishes, leaving a single man as the world’s only witness.
That book, “Dissipatio H.G.” (NYRB Classics), has now been published in English, in a translation by Frederika Randall, a journalist who turned to translating Italian after experiencing health problems caused by a fall. The plot begins with a botched suicide attempt: the unnamed narrator, a loner living in a retreat surrounded by meadows and glaciers, walks to a cave, on the eve of his fortieth birthday, intent on throwing himself down a well that leads to an underground lake. “Because the negative outweighed the positive,” he explains. “On my scales. By seventy percent. Was that a banal motive? I’m not sure.”
Sitting on the edge of the well, he doesn’t so much lose heart as get distracted. The mood is all wrong; he feels calm, lucid, too upbeat to go through with it. He is carrying a flashlight, which he flicks on and off. “Feet dangling in the dark,” he takes a sip of the brandy he has brought with him and considers how the Spanish variety is better than the French and why this is so widely unappreciated. Before leaving the cave, he bumps his head on a rock, and hears a peal of thunder: it’s the season’s first storm. Back home, lying in bed and still dressed, annoyed at the last-minute change of plans, he picks up a gun, considering an easier solution. He brings the “black-eyed girl” to his mouth and pulls the trigger, twice. The gun doesn’t work. He falls asleep.
The next morning, from his kitchen window he sees an overturned car in the distance. He goes to help, thinking that he might start over, in a way—“return to the living,” as he puts it. But it is raining heavily, and when he reaches a flooded creek he returns home rather than try to cross it. After changing clothes and drinking coffee, he walks to the closest village to tell the police about the accident. But the station is empty. Garages and hotels are, too. What first looks like evidence of a national holiday takes on a more disturbing cast: the narrator roams one village and then another without encountering a single person. He finds several cars still running, and drives one to the nearest city, called Chrysopolis, in the hope of finding an explanation for the collective vanishing. But this city, too, is empty, its sleek façades shuttered.
Morselli was born in 1912, in Bologna, and grew up in a well-to-do family in Milan. His father was a pharmaceutical executive and a member of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. When Morselli was ten, his mother was hospitalized for a long time with the Spanish flu, and she died two years later. He spent his adolescence and early adulthood reluctantly placating and then frustrating his father’s hopes for his professional life, studying law and, after a stint in the Army, taking a job, for a short period, at a chemical company. After the death of a sister, Morselli began receiving an allowance from his father, and decided to dedicate himself to writing. He published two books, a long essay and a philosophical dialogue, but all of his attempts at fiction were rejected. In 1974, shortly after his suicide, one of Italy’s most prestigious publishers, Adelphi, brought out his novel “Rome Without the Pope.” Written around 1966, it’s a Surrealistic tale about a fictitious Pope who leaves the Vatican to live on the outskirts of Rome, where he plays tennis and ingests hallucinogens. The reviews were enthusiastic. More novels were published throughout the seventies and eighties, posthumously establishing Morselli as one of the country’s most prominent postwar writers.
He hopped from genre to genre before ending with post-apocalyptic fiction; the results are thrilling but uneven. “Divertimento 1889,” which was published in English in the eighties, and was admired by Shirley Hazzard, is a Belle Époque farce that revolves around an attempt by Umberto I—the King of Italy from 1878 to 1900, when he was assassinated by an anarchist—to take a holiday, incognito, in the Swiss Alps. It is occasionally funny, but often glib, as though the author were trying to mimic the shallowness of his subject. Morselli’s best novel is “The Communist,” published by NYRB Classics in 2017, in another translation by Randall. It is the story of Walter Ferranini, an Italian Communist who fights Franco in Spain and lives for a time in the United States before returning to Italy and joining Parliament. As Ferranini’s political work grows distant from the grassroots labors that radicalized him, he comes unmoored; political and personal crises coalesce and accrue. Although Morselli’s father served in Parliament, his own engagement with politics seems to have been limited—and yet the book is one of the least condescending portraits of a mid-ranking politician you could imagine, illustrating the intersection of our public and private lives, and mixing the novel of ideas with social realism. The tone of the book is melancholic, reminiscent of Morselli’s great contemporary Cesare Pavese, who killed himself with an overdose of sleeping pills at the age of forty-one.
“Dissipatio H.G.,” despite its fanciful premise, may be Morselli’s most autobiographical book: the erudite and neurotically self-aware narrator, a former newspaperman who has left the world behind to write in solitude, is essentially an alter ego. The novel’s title comes from a phrase that the narrator claims to have recovered from an ancient text by the Syrian philosopher Iamblichus, a Neoplatonist. It refers to the possibility that everyone might simply evaporate into thin air. (Iamblichus was “less catastrophic than other prophets,” the narrator explains.) Walking the streets of Chrysopolis, the narrator watches a hen strutting around and a horde of cats mating on the steps of a bank. “The world has never been so alive as it is since a certain breed of bipeds disappeared,” he thinks. He never liked the city. In the village near his retreat, alone on a bench, he is hyperattentive to the sounds lacing the general silence—a dripping drainpipe, the flick of a traffic light.
There are hints that something fantastical has occurred, perhaps connected with the storm that began while the narrator was in the cave. But his investigations into what actually took place are quickly dropped in favor of descriptions of the landscape and reflections on Durkheim, Pascal, and Hegel, among others. He sets out to search for miners, on the theory that being in a cave might have shielded him from what he calls the Event, but one senses that he is looking more for diversion than for enlightenment. Whatever has caused humankind’s disappearance remains obscure to him:
Typically, stories about the near-extinction of humanity dramatize the process of decay, with lessons on the fragility of civilization, and how easily a sense of community is shattered when people become desperate. Mary Shelley’s “The Last Man,” published in 1826, one of the earliest modern apocalyptic novels, chronicles humanity’s failure to face up to a global plague, resulting in a kind of Hobbesian conflict survived only by the title character. That narrative trajectory now feels familiar. But Morselli forgoes the drama of depopulation, reducing the genre’s basic premise to its essence and its aftermath. His protagonist is not someone who cherishes social relations but a loner who has long since social-distanced, and flirted with self-annihilation. Given the narrator’s—and Morselli’s—views on contemporary society and its endless efforts to eliminate all kinds of earthly friction, one may even read this end of the world as a kind of collective wish fulfillment. One of the questions Morselli seems to have had on his mind is: How alive was everyone in the first place?
With nothing to do but walk around and observe, the narrator finds himself surprisingly impressed by some of the things people have left behind, or at least by their stubborn persistence in the absence of humans. A self-defined “Anthropophobe,” he begins to feel an unexpected sympathy for his fellow-man. “I waited for it to arrive and strike me,” he says of whatever has disappeared everyone else:
But this burst of attentiveness eventually gives way to sluggishness and despondency. The narrator lets himself go, shaving less often, leaving the kitchen sink clogged and the bedsheets unchanged. He develops a sweet tooth, feasting on chocolates and pastries. He abandons a journal that he has barely started.
A sudden, invisible phenomenon that has emptied the streets of cities and villages, without fanfare or farewells, leaving our protagonist in a state of existential limbo: the echoes one finds in “Dissipatio H.G.” of life during the coronavirus pandemic are, at times, so glaring that some passages read like thinly fictionalized versions of the present. Apocalyptic fiction is often disinterred amid catastrophes, either for their prescience or because they are paradoxically reassuring. Each phase of the quarantine seems represented in this slim novel, from the short-lived pleasure at nature’s reclaiming of old ground to the vague impulse to take notes and the growing pointlessness of grooming. Morselli is drawn to anticlimaxes, resisting drama at every turn, and it is this instinct that makes his final book so resonant with certain experiences of the past year. The tone of its post-apocalyptic world is not unceasing despair but melancholic inconsistency. Desire is transient; states of mind are fleeting and untrustworthy. “What for anyone else would be an ocean of negativity, an utter horror, is something I’m able to float on in a paper boat,” the narrator reflects. “A boat made of a few, mediocre, at times ironic, general ideas.”
In matching a world-weary protagonist to a depopulated planet, Morselli seems less interested in dissecting social shocks than in probing the porous border between blissful solitude and extreme loneliness. As the novel progresses, the narrator’s account of his environment becomes increasingly unhinged. The world, which at first looked “like an apartment whose owners are on vacation,” becomes a “tomb, wide open and empty.” The narrator briefly hallucinates the voice of a long-dead psychiatrist named Karpinsky, who once treated him for a nervous condition. He goes in search of this man, clinging to what is perhaps the one affectionate memory he has of another human being. At times, his fear is all-encompassing, “a gelid black substance in which I’m miserably, foolishly stuck, like a fly frozen in ice. ‘Where can I go?’ I wonder, ‘Where can I hide?’ And I understand that I cannot go anywhere, the fear is all around, and identical.”
Randall, who died in May, in Rome, shortly after finishing her translation, manages to get across, in English, the bleakness of Morselli’s restraint. At one point, the narrator returns to his retreat and, upon entering his storeroom, finds a cow munching on copies of one of his books. The sight of his words being digested fills him with tenderness. “I’d get them back tomorrow, supposing I succeeded in milking her, my ideas finally remunerative,” he thinks. The ironic tone is characteristic of Morselli’s books, but there is a nervous edge to the joke. Only someone well versed in loneliness—artistic, physical, emotional—could produce such a ruthlessly realistic account of an isolating catastrophe, tending to its false starts and its interruptions, its strange mixture of anxiety and tedium. In the end, that experience had a price. ♦
