My Other Spruce and Maple Self

"Early on you are assailed by an image so potently repellent, so graphically horrible that it squats in your brain and refuses to be dislodged." Jonathan Meades

"Susan Finlay has a staggeringly beautiful prose style that belies a devastating viciousness. And, what's more, she knows how to tell a story." Anouchka Grose

 I had just gotten away from it all, by which I mean all those ordinary, boring things like skyscrapers, cigar-smoking industrialists, linoleum, plastics, television, westerns and marihuana. I had either seen or heard about them.


Whether they are good or bad is beside the point..."A nameless graphic designer is haunted by the concentration camp in which he was once interned. Obsessed with his past, as well as Italy's present 'economic miracle', he retreats to a rural villa where he decorates the rooms with "arrows, signs, advertisements"; invents a new, purposefully incomprehensible typeface; and attempts to devise a marketing campaign for stones. Upon finally returning to Milan life becomes even more unbalanced.


He loses his job and acquires a mistress whom he soon confuses both with his wife and the memory of the young, Czech woman he abandoned at the end of the war. Known primarily as a screenwriter for Michelangelo Antonioni, Federico Fellini and Andrei Tarkovsky among many others, Tonino Guerra also wrote poetry and fiction. Reissued to mark the centenary of his birth, and with a new introduction by acclaimed cultural critic Michael Bracewell,