Verdigris by Michele Mari

From Switzerland we take a little hop and a skip into northern Italy, specifically Lake Maggiore (which indeed has its northern toe sticking into Svizzera). 

In Italy Michele Mari is very highly regarded as an author, poet and academic. He is considered one of the leading authorities on 18th-century Italian literature, and it is claimed by some that in future years he will be held as the most important of Italy's current crop of authors. However, as well as being very much in the literary world, Mari has a veneration for sci-fi and comics.

Before we get into the book itself, let's discuss the cover. And Other Stories are an amazing imprint, putting out some stellar translations, and I have no doubt I will be reading many more of their titles in the near future. Most of their recent titles seemed to be graced with this uniform cover. I am still unsure what I think of it. On one hand, it is striking in its simplicity. On the other, I have a personal aversion to the pilcrow (¶) - that's a cross I will have to bear. But more importantly, I think a cover is a good chance for an artist or graphic designer to give their interpretation of the feel and themes of the novel. And whatever perceived wisdom tells us, we do judge a book by its cover. If And Other Stories all have essentially the same cover, are they telling us the stories are much of a muchness? (And they aren't.) Honestly, I don't know.

And so, to the novel itself. Every now and then, you read a novel with which you click to such an extent that it enthuses you, not only about that particular novel, but for all the novels by the same author you haven't read yet, and the whole act of reading itself. For me, Verdigris is such a novel, and so you will excuse me if I spend the next few paragraphs excessively effervescing over it.

Mari's love of a particular kind of genre fiction, i.e. cosmic horror is evident in Verdigris. He namechecks Lovecraft at several points, and expertly uses a lot of the devices from the genre without watering down the literary credentials. He gives us a book which pulls the reader into its strange, uncanny world with a visceral compunction that serves to heighten the deeper aspects.

Verdigris plays with the notion of what is real. The plot centres around the young Michelino, spending a summer at his grandparents' house near Lake Maggiore, and trying to help the groundskeeper Felice, whose memory is dissolving day by day. It is based on an episode from Mari's own childhood, but I don't think he's ever elucidated exactly what the reality was, and I hope he doesn't. For though the protagonist is clearly a version of the author (Michele - Michelino) the novel self-consciously presents itself as a literary construct. The language used is reminiscent of Lovecraft's purple prose, giving a Weird Tales pulp vibe, which adds another veneer of abstraction. Felice himself is rendered in a speech which is barely intelligible. In an interesting postscript by the translator (Brian Robert Moore, who did an incredible job) he details why he chose a deliberately inconsistent Irish vernacular for the English translation, to evoke the rich and poetic literature of that culture. In the original Italian, Felice used an archaic Milanese-ish dialect, which to Italian ears would conjure up romantic poems of a bygone era, but would make little sense and had little basis in historical accuracy.

The story is not true, it clearly takes instances from Mari's childhood but twists them. Mari's excellent invocation of a narrative from the point of view of a child with a wandering and elaborate imagination makes us question what is real within the book, what has been changed by the author, and what then is, in turn, being changed by the narrator. Is what Michelino tells us, what actually happens? Or is he elaborating, playing childish games? And at the end of the day does it matter? As Felice's memory crumbles, the gaps are filled in with increasingly fantastical replacements.

I celebrated this novel with an out-of-date
version of the Italian flag; mainly because I
already had it. But it doesn't seem out of place
in that it was used up to 1946 and Verdigris
spends a lot of time looking back to what 
happened during WWII. But also because
crests are always cool, and the novel twists
reality in favour of narrative.

In the beginning of the novel things are more or less grounded in a reality we can recognise as our own, though it is relayed through the eyes of a child who has read too many adventure stories. (No, not too many, I don't think there is such a thing as too many adventure stories.) Felice is described as a monster, and Mari spins the wonderful trick of making him appear as such (to me, he resembled a shambling Frankenstein's monster, though maybe that was because I had just watched Guillermo del Toro's version of the film.) His description is factually that of an old, albeit ugly man, but it is so exquisitely filtered through the lens of an introverted, gothic-loving, childish mind, that we do see him as monster.

As the story progresses, Felice forgets more and more. And an increasing part of the narrative that Michelino is building of Felice's past becomes freed from reality, his imagination filling in the gaps. Yet the 'evidence', the literal skeletons, seem to support the crazy, terrifying version of events. Is Michelino lying to us? Or is he lying to himself? The story is told by a 50 something year old Michelino (Mari was 52 when the novel was first published in Italian) looking back at his childhood, so maybe he has been lying to himself? Maybe these skeletons aren't so literal after all. And are these lies wrong? Should they be discarded, thrown to one side in search of the truth? Or, actually, is this narrative more important than the truth? To Michelino, to Mari, I would suggest it is. The random facts of what really happened in a small Italian village in the dying days of WWII have little bearing on his life. But the story he constructed, a dark and twisted tale that none-the-less has its roots in the innocence of childhood, likely has more of a bearing on who he is.

Another facet which I found interesting, but only really struck me in the post-reading mulling-over period, is that of father figures. Felice desperately clings to the idea of his father, an idea that likely has no foundation in fact (but again, how important is fact?). I don't think Michelino ever mentions his parents, yet he turns to Felice, a figure he sees as a monster, to act as an Ersatz father, even while Felice becomes ever more child like. There is a sense of the blind leading the blind. The pair are freed of the responsible 'adult' approach, and the adolescents (Michelino is on the verge of becoming a man, Felice is regressing to a child, they meet somewhere in the middle) spur each other on in forging a reality which scares and thrills them both in equal measure. They simultaneously want an adult point of view to apply some brakes, and avoid it.  

To say I enjoyed Verdigris would be an understatement. It is the best book I have read for a long time, certainly the best of the 86 so far in my Round the World challenge. I will personally be digging out every English translation of Mari's work I can find, and I strongly suggest you at least give Verdigris a try. Five stars don't seem enough, so lets give it ★★★★★★★.