Dissipatio H.G. by Guido Morselli (smart ebook reader .TXT) 📕

GUIDO MORSELLI (1912–1973) spent his youth in Milan, where his father was an executive with a pharmaceutical company. When he was twelve his mother died from the Spanish flu, an event that devastated the reserved child. After attending a Jesuit-run primary school and a classical secondary school, Morselli graduated from the Università degli Studi di Milano with a law degree in 1935. Instead of practicing law, however, he embarked on a long trip around the Continent. Though he wrote consistently from the remote town in the lake region of Lombardy where he lived alone, Morselli succeeded in publishing only two books over the course of his life: the essays Proust o del sentimento (Proust, or On Sentiment, 1943) and Realismo e fantasia (Realism and Invention, 1947). His many works of fiction, journalism, and philosophy were repeatedly rejected by publishers, and, frustrated by his perceived failures, he committed suicide in 1973. Hanging in his library was the motto Etiam si omnes, ego non (Though all do it, I do not). In fact, Morselli’s nine posthumously published novels, among them Roma senza papa (Rome Without the Pope, 1974), Divertimento 1889 (1975), and Dissipatio H.G. (1977), enjoyed considerable critical success. Morselli left his farm and lands to the town of Gavirate in his will, and today Parco Morselli looks south onto Lago di Varese and north toward the Alpine foothills.

FREDERIKA RANDALL (1948–2020) was a writer, reporter, and translator. Among her translations are Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian, and for NYRB, Guido Morselli’s The Communist. She received the National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship for Translation and the PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant, and with Sergio Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize. She finished her translation of Dissipatio H.G. shortly before her death in Rome in 2020.

DISSIPATIO H.G.

The Vanishing

GUIDO MORSELLI

Translated from the Italian and with an introduction by

FREDERIKA RANDALL

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1977 by Adelphi Edizioni S.p.A. Milano

Translation copyright © 2020 by Frederika Randall

Introduction copyright © 2020 by Frederika Randall

All rights reserved.

Published in the Italian language by Adelphi Edizioni as Dissipatio H.G. and first published in the Gli Adelphi series in 2012.

First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2020.

This book was translated thanks to a grant awarded by the Italian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation.

Cover image: Lester Johnson, Untitled Head, 1960; permission of the Lester Johnson Estate, courtesy Steven Harvey Fine Art Projects

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Morselli, Guido, author. | Randall, Frederika, translator.

Title: Dissipatio H.G. = The vanishing / Guido Morselli; translated from the Italian and with an introduction by Frederika Randall.

Other titles: Dissipatio H.G. English | Vanishing

Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2020] | Series: New York Review Books classics | Translated into English from Italian. | Summary: “Dissipatio HG is a surrealistic fantasy novel where humankind disappears leaving its cities behind; only the narrator remains, and he wanders between Italy and Switzerland, contemplating the empty cities”—Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020004670 (print) | LCCN 2020004671 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681374765 (paperback ; acid-free paper) | ISBN 9781681374772 (ebook)

Classification: LCC PQ4829.O714 D4813 2020 (print) | LCC PQ4829.O714 (ebook) | DDC 853/.914—dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004670

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020004671

ISBN 978-1-68137-477-2

v1.0

For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

CONTENTS

Cover

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

DISSIPATIO H.G.

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

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20

Translator’s Notes

INTRODUCTION

THE PLANET is tentatively coming back to life, now that mankind has suddenly vanished. Mountain goats romp on abandoned railroad tracks; birds don’t just sing, they’re making an unholy racket. Two owls hoot out a tender duet all night long. “Their instincts tell them something they certainly never expected: the great enemy has withdrawn.” And the whole of nature has come out to celebrate the end of the world. “The end of the world?” says the last man on earth, who has been hooting along with the owls. “One of the pranks played by anthropocentrism is to suggest that the end of our species will bring about the death of animal and vegetable nature, the end of the earth itself. The fall of the heavens. . . . Ainsi fera la morte de toutes choses notre morte,” as Old Montaigne said, “Our death will bring about the death of all things.” “Come on,” snaps the narrator, “The world has never been so alive as it is since a certain breed of bipeds disappeared. It’s never been so clean, so sparkling, so good-humored.”

The last man on earth in Guido Morselli’s brilliant, disturbing novel Dissipatio H.G. lives near a mountain village in an unnamed country not far from Chrysopolis, a fictional city reminiscent of Zürich. It’s sometime around 1973, when the novel was written, and the man is well ahead of his time in perceiving how deeply Western thought is tied up with the Anthropocene. The knowledge that Man the Measure of all Things is bound to exploit and despoil nature had not yet penetrated an Italy drunk with acquiring new cars, refrigerators, and TVs. Dissipatio H.G. was born premature in other ways too; the very shape of the story was peculiar. The post-apocalyptic novel, scarcely news today, was pretty much unknown in Italian literature at the time. But Morselli, like the last man on earth, was always profoundly out of synch with his times. He, too, lived in near-isolation close to a small town (Gavirate, not far from the Italian border with Switzerland); he, too, despised the materialism and the cult of money he believed had overwhelmed Italy during its postwar “economic miracle,” represented in the novel by Chrysopolis, the Golden City of fifty-six banks and almost as many churches.

Morselli sent off his manuscript to Mondadori in the spring of 1973, and it came back some weeks later with a rejection letter. He had taken a brief holiday and returned to find it