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“Divertimento 1889,” which was published in English in the eighties, and was admired by Shirley Hazzard, is a Belle Époque farce that revolves around an attempt by Umberto I-the King of Italy from 1878 to 1900, when he was assassinated by an anarchist-to take a holiday, incognito, in the Swiss Alps. He hopped from genre to genre before ending with post-apocalyptic fiction the results are thrilling but uneven. More novels were published throughout the seventies and eighties, posthumously establishing Morselli as one of the country’s most prominent postwar writers. In 1974, shortly after his suicide, one of Italy’s most prestigious publishers, Adelphi, brought out his novel “Rome Without the Pope.” Written around 1966, it’s a Surrealistic tale about a fictitious Pope who leaves the Vatican to live on the outskirts of Rome, where he plays tennis and ingests hallucinogens. He published two books, a long essay and a philosophical dialogue, but all of his attempts at fiction were rejected. After the death of a sister, Morselli began receiving an allowance from his father, and decided to dedicate himself to writing.
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He spent his adolescence and early adulthood reluctantly placating and then frustrating his father’s hopes for his professional life, studying law and, after a stint in the Army, taking a job, for a short period, at a chemical company. When Morselli was ten, his mother was hospitalized for a long time with the Spanish flu, and she died two years later. His father was a pharmaceutical executive and a member of Mussolini’s National Fascist Party. Morselli was born in 1912, in Bologna, and grew up in a well-to-do family in Milan. But this city, too, is empty, its sleek façades shuttered. He finds several cars still running, and drives one to the nearest city, called Chrysopolis, in the hope of finding an explanation for the collective vanishing.
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What first looks like evidence of a national holiday takes on a more disturbing cast: the narrator roams one village and then another without encountering a single person. After changing clothes and drinking coffee, he walks to the closest village to tell the police about the accident. But it is raining heavily, and when he reaches a flooded creek he returns home rather than try to cross it. He goes to help, thinking that he might start over, in a way-“return to the living,” as he puts it. The next morning, from his kitchen window he sees an overturned car in the distance. He brings the “black-eyed girl” to his mouth and pulls the trigger, twice. Back home, lying in bed and still dressed, annoyed at the last-minute change of plans, he picks up a gun, considering an easier solution. Before leaving the cave, he bumps his head on a rock, and hears a peal of thunder: it’s the season’s first storm. “Feet dangling in the dark,” he takes a sip of the brandy he has brought with him and considers how the Spanish variety is better than the French and why this is so widely unappreciated. He is carrying a flashlight, which he flicks on and off. The mood is all wrong he feels calm, lucid, too upbeat to go through with it. Sitting on the edge of the well, he doesn’t so much lose heart as get distracted. “Because the negative outweighed the positive,” he explains. The plot begins with a botched suicide attempt: the unnamed narrator, a loner living in a retreat surrounded by meadows and glaciers, walks to a cave, on the eve of his fortieth birthday, intent on throwing himself down a well that leads to an underground lake. That book, “ Dissipatio H.G.” (NYRB Classics), has now been published in English, in a translation by Frederika Randall, a journalist who turned to translating Italian after experiencing health problems caused by a fall. The last one that he finished tells the story of an apocalyptic event in which all of humanity suddenly vanishes, leaving a single man as the world’s only witness.
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There he tended to the land, made wine, and wrote books that faced diminishing odds of publication. Before returning to his family’s home in Varese and ending his life, he had been living in near-isolation for two decades, on a small property in Lombardy, near the Swiss-Italian border. He left several rejection letters on his desk, and a short note that read, “I bear no grudges.” It was the kind of gesture one of his protagonists might have performed-a show of ironic detachment that belied a deep and obvious pain. In 1973, shortly after his last novel, like the others before it, was rejected by publishers, the Italian writer Guido Morselli shot himself in the head and died.