Dissipatio H.G. Guido Morselli (best time to read books .txt) 📖

in the mail. In a lifetime of furious writing, it was the seventh novel by this literary outsider that publishers had declined, and this time it felt like a fatal defeat. That night Guido Morselli loaded his Browning 7.65 and shot himself, putting an end to one of postwar Italy’s most original literary careers.

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Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the novel itself begins with a suicide, a suicide deeply desired but finally thwarted. Just before the great disappearance happens, the protagonist has decided to end it all. Not wanting his body to be found, he has devised a plan to climb to a cave he’s heard opens into an underground lake, where he will drown himself. But when the time comes, sitting on a ledge above the lake he begins to think about the Spanish brandy he has brought along to give him courage. It’s really very good. Of course, he thinks; brandy that’s made in Europe’s south, where the sun brings out the sugar in the grape, will always be better than what the French can achieve with their cloudy skies—which is why they make such a fetish of those oak barrels they age it in. The superiority of French cognac is a great scam, he thinks. His train of thought begins to fizzle out, as does his will to die, and he gets up and leaves the cave, only to find that while he was away, all of humanity has disappeared.

Dissipatio H.G: the title might seem to suggest a leisurely dissipation, but in fact the disappearance of the humani generis, the human race, is abrupt. The Latin words, according to Morselli, are those of a fourth-century pagan Neoplatonist, prophesying the demise of the species. “[I]n the Latin of late empire, dissipatio meant evaporation, or nebulization,1 or some physical process like that.” As the last man tells it, human beings simply vanish from the earth leaving all their detritus behind them—without so much as moving their chairs back from their desks or even minimally disturbing the bedcovers.

Unconvinced at first that he is the only survivor of the species, the last man visits the grand hotels of his mountains where he “shops” for provisions in pantries and freezers. He goes to the airport and spends the night on a chair, waiting in vain for the arriving flights from Caracas, Tehran, and Montreal. He breaks into his old girlfriend Tuti’s house, eats from her refrigerator, sleeps in her bed, feels mildly guilty about the fact he didn’t love her. From the town department store he takes TV sets, film cameras, bottles of Coke, and tourist posters, and piles them up in the square in a monumental “cenotaph” to honor the missing. He visits the newspaper where he used to work:

[T]he linotype machines were still going through their crazy motions, the skeletal arms somehow continuing to rise and fall. When they disappeared (at two in the morning) this was where production stood: linotypists composing in the print room, editors finishing off the last stories upstairs, press not yet rolling. The wire service flashes, frozen on the teletype machines. I didn’t bother to read them but I could see they were interrupted. Transmission had broken off at the other end, while here everything was normal. In its special stall, the IBM with its red lights lit. In fact, all the lights are still burning in the office, and in the secretary’s room—that would be Miss Manàas as always—a little fan continues to hum on her desk. She’d been writing and the pen lies across the page, as if fallen from her hand.

The clever, manic, sometimes annoyingly over-cultivated mind2 of the novel’s memorable protagonist, too, has something in common with the author himself. The unnamed narrator is a writer, a journalist, who has left his job in Chrysopolis and moved to a solitary outpost in the mountains to escape human society and the ambition, greed, and noise it produces:

Switchback by switchback I ascend to the kingdom of the oaks and the beech, past the chestnuts with their huge domes, until I meet the tall, slim species, treetops lost in the fog. My real family—and my only one. I’ve rejoiced in them before. For a moment I’m invaded with the usual pleasure, a physical sensation, felt in the breath and the blood. This is my country: houses of dark wood, red shutters framed in white, the sweet-smelling, reviving evening air.

In his peaceful paradise, the last man is always feverishly pondering some philosophical problem, as if his mind must constantly race in order to keep himself alive. To translate the novel is to wrestle with a solipsist. The prose is clipped, abbreviated, as if intended only for him. He’s hard to follow, self-absorbed. In fact, the last man often doesn’t seem to care whether you can follow him. But his emotions, though tamped down, are lush, extravagant. And he’s witty, ironic. Of course he’s a solipsist, he says; in philosophical jargon solipsism just means a perspective confined entirely to the self—and who else is there now but him?

Morselli himself, in his relative isolation in rural Lombardy, did not want to be a solipsist. Born into bourgeois comfort, Guido, as an adult, lived out a frugal existence in the country, reading and writing, riding his horse Zeffirino in the hills. On his identity papers he gave his occupation as farmer. He grew grapes and made wine, a red called Sasso di Gavirate, which was said to be prized by high prelates3 of the Church in Rome. A few bottles recently surfaced, now fifty years old. He was “difficult, extravagant, unstable,” with “moments of festive joy and others of gloomy depression,” wrote his friend Maria Bruna Bassi, the person who most supported him through years of discouragement. Valentina Fortichiari, the excellent editor of the modern Adelphi editions, tells us that although he had no home in any political party, he was always alert to human injustice, and while he had no love for organized religion, he was a