Verdigris
Brian Robert Moore
(Translator)
Description
At the tail end of the 1960s, the thirteen-year-old Michelino spends
his summers at his grandparents' modest estate in Nasca, near Lake Maggiore,
losing himself in the tales of horror, adventure, and mystery shelved in his
grandfather's library. The greatest mystery he's ever encountered, however,
doesn't come from a book--it's the groundskeeper, Felice, a sometimes
frightening, sometimes gentle, always colorful man of uncertain age who speaks
an enchanting dialect and whose memory gets worse with each passing day. When Michelino
volunteers to help the old man by providing him with clever mnemonic devices to
keep his memory alive, the boy soon finds himself obsessed with piecing
together the eerie hodgepodge of Felice's biography . . . a quest that leads to
the uncovering of skeletons in Nazi uniforms in the attic, to Felice's
admission that he can hear the voices of the dead, and to a new perspective on
Felice's endless war against the insatiable local slugs, who are by no means
merely a horticultural threat.
And yet nothing could be more fascinating to Michelino
than Felice's own secret origins. Where did he come from? Is he the victim or
the villain of his story? Is he a noble hero, a holy fool, or perhaps the very
thing that Michelino most wants and fears: a real-life monster.
Product Details
| Publisher | And Other Stories |
| Publish Date | January 02, 2024 |
| Pages | 240 |
| Language | English |
| Type |  Paperback / softback |
| EAN/UPC | 9781913505905 |
| Dimensions | 7.7 X 5.0 X 0.8 inches | 0.5 pounds |
About the Author
Michele
Mari is one of Italy's most renowned contemporary
writers. He has published ten novels in addition to several short story and
poetry collections, and has received prestigious awards including the Bagutta Prize, the Mondello Prize, and the
Selezione Campiello Prize. A former professor of Italian literature at the
University of Milan, he has translated classic novels by Herman Melville, George
Orwell, John Steinbeck, and H. G. Wells. In a survey published by the
magazine Orlando Esplorazioni in
2015, Mari was ranked the contemporary Italian author most likely to be read by
generations to come.
Brian Robert Moore has translated A Silence Shared
by Lalla Romano, Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, and the work
of other distinguished Italian authors. He has received a National Endowment
for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a Santa Maddalena Foundation Fellowship,
and the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature. For And
Other Stories, he has already translated Michele Mari's You, Bleeding Childhood, which was the first book by Mari to be
published in English.
Reviews
Winner of the 2008 Grinzane Cavour Prize
"Mr. Moore wonderfully reproduces Mr. Mari's anagrams, mnemonic devices and puns. Verdigris is a delightful game, up until the moment it turns deadly serious." --Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
"This is a magical novel not to be missed." --World Literature Today
"Mari is known as a master of old literary forms and languages, with stylistic mannerisms that he calls 'literary vampirism' ... For lovers of the gothic and the supernatural there is much to admire in Michele Mari's work. But what remains long in the mind is a feeling of extreme loneliness, regrets and longings for an irretrievable past, for loving family and accepting friends, which no amount of memories can return." --Times Literary Supplement
"Moore's translation is lively and inventive ... It's as easy for adults to rewrite history, Mari suggests, as it is for children to retreat into fantasy. Consequently, a strange world emerges, one in which 'everything flows and nothing stays'. This 'gothic fantasy', as Mari has called it, can be read as a commentary on collective amnesia, a condition affecting not just contemporary Italy, where fascism is becoming a real threat again, but also societies all over the globe. As Europe's far right raises its head, literature that exhumes ghosts of the past grows vital. If left undisturbed, they will keep haunting the future." --Financial Times
"A pleasingly strange, crepuscular novel" --Irish Times
"The novel is an intriguing mystery ... Brian Robert Moore's translation is astonishing work." --Barry Pierce
"A curious teenager's conversations with an odd groundskeeper yield far more than he'd bargained for [...] Kudos to translator Moore, whose consummate conversion allows readers to luxuriate in the language of even deceptively minor moments: "amid the heads of lettuce, languished the halved cadavers of red slugs." A gripping, beguiling, occasionally discomfiting, and utterly fascinating tour de force." --Kirkus Reviews, starred review
"The English version of this novel...is more than a translation. It is an Ovidian exercise, transforming what could have been baffling to Anglophone readers into a rich and captivating narrative" --Lee Langley, The Spectator
"One reads it quickly, in one go, but then it stays to "breathe" in one's soul for days, as though it were to a living thing--just like the turquoise poison referenced in the title, once it's dissolved in water. A writer of great talent, Mari seems to have even outdone himself." --Carla Benedetti, L'Espresso
"The theme of the 'double', in its various forms, is a favorite subject of the modern Western literary imagination (from Hoffmann to von Chamisso, from Stevenson to Wilde, and many others). But no writer, I believe, has managed to conceive in this regard what Michele Mari offers us in his new novel, Verdigris." --Stefano Giovanardi, la Repubblica
Praise for the Author
"There's a Calvino-esque blend of the playful and the rigorous to You, Bleeding Childhood. A uniquely refreshing book . . . idiosyncratic, amusing and moving." --The Guardian
"If I were to give a book award to a living Italian writer, man or woman, I'd pick Michele Mari." --Domenico Starone, I-Italy
"The greatest living Italian writer."-- Andrea Coccia, Linkiesta
"The charm that Mari exercises on his readers, from the most devoted to the most distracted, is incredible . . . More than anyone else, Michele Mari represents today a model of writer that seems on the point of disappearing--fully literary, lofty, in short, twentieth-century." --Sara Marzullo, Esquire
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