Dissipatio HG

The Vanishing

Guido Morselli, Frederika Randall

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English

New York Review of Books
16 March 2021

Fiction & Literature; Science fiction; Apocalyptic; Post Holocaust Sci-Fi; Technothriller

"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 striving, but to find that the entire human race has evaporated in an instant is more than he had bargained for.

Guido Morselli's arresting post-apocalyptic novel, written just before he died, a 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. He travels around searching for signs of life at the US army base--palm trees, convertibles, and missile bays under the roadway--and scouts the well-appointed kitchens of his alpine valley's grand hotels for provisions, all the while brooding on the limits of human vision- his own, but also that of humankind. Meanwhile, life itself--the rest of nature--is just beginning to flourish now that human beings are gone.

A precocious portrait of our Anthropocene world and a philosophical last will and testament from a great Italian outsider."

By: Guido Morselli
Translated with commentary by: Frederika Randall
Imprint: New York Review of Books
Country of Publication: United States
Dimensions: Height: 203mm, Width: 127mm,
Weight: 368g
ISBN: 9781681374765
ISBN 10: 1681374765
Pages: 168
Publication Date: 16 March 2021
Audience: General/trade , ELT Advanced
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Guido Morselli (1912-1973) was a novelist and essayist. After serving in the Italian Army, he began writing reportages and short stories while living abroad. He wrote several works of fiction, including Past Conditional, Divertimento, and Roman senza papa ( Rome without a Pope ) as well as four books of essays. NYRB Classics published his novel The Communist in 2017. Frederika Randall is 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 has received NEA and PEN/Heim translation grants, and with Sergio Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize. She lives in Rome.

Reviews for Dissipatio HG: The Vanishing

Just as Morselli, tragically overlooked in his lifetime, was destined to be hailed as one of contemporary Italy's most iconoclastic writers, so was this novel, his last, destined to be translated, at the end of her long and distinguished career, by Frederika Randall. I can think of few works of literature more appropriate for our acutely isolating and endangered times. --Jhumpa Lahiri I recently had a chance to read a wonderful book, Dissipatio H.G., written by an Italian, Guido Morselli, who subsequently killed himself. I think it would make a highly interesting subject for a film, and you would certainly be the ideal director. --Letter from Marcello Mastroianni to Andrei Tarkovsky