Dissipatio H.G.
The Vanishing
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
A fantastic and philosophical vision of the apocalypse by one of the most striking Italian novelists of the twentieth century.
From his solitary buen retiro in the mountains, the last man on earth drives to the capital Chrysopolis to see if anyone else has survived the Vanishing. But there’s no one else, living or dead, in that city of “holy plutocracy,” with its fifty-six banks and as many churches. He’d left the metropolis to escape his fellow humans and their struggles and ambitions, but to find that the entire human race has evaporated in an instant is more than he had bargained for. Meanwhile, life itself—the rest of nature—is just beginning to flourish now that human beings are gone.
Guido Morselli’s arresting postapocalyptic novel, written just before he died by suicide in 1973, depicts a man much like the author himself—lonely, brilliant, difficult—and a world much like our own, mesmerized by money, speed, and machines. Dissipatio H.G. is a precocious portrait of our Anthropocene world, and a philosophical last will and testament from a great Italian outsider.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The late Morselli (The Communist) serves up an eerie novel about a man who has survived the sudden and inexplicable disappearance of the human race, first published in 1973. The narrator is a neurotic, hyperintellectual former newspaper columnist who has left the decadent city of Chrysopolis for the solace of the mountains. One night, after a failed suicide attempt, the narrator returns to find that all of humanity has vanished and only their material accumulations remain cars sit abandoned on roads, linotype machines are "still going through their crazy motions" at his newspaper office, and public notices hang in windows. The narrator tries to telephones old friends and colleagues, and visits military bases, airports, and hotels, but finds no one. Much of the book is the narrator's lonely thoughts: "I am, therefore I think." While Morselli (1912 1973) calls attention to the limits of allegorical writing, as the narrator muses how others would see his predicament as a "medium for social satire," the philosophical digressions occasionally feel pedantic. The novel is most engaging when the theorizing fades away and the narrator confronts his surroundings as nature slowly engulfs the material world. This is a powerful, erudite meditation on existence and the terror of loneliness.
