Verdigris
At the tail end of the 1960s, the thirteen-year-old Michelino spends his summers at his grandparents’ modest estate in Nasca, near Lake Maggiore, losing himself in the tales of horror, adventure, and mystery shelved in his grandfather’s library. The greatest mystery he’s ever encountered, however, doesn’t come from a book — it's the groundskeeper, Felice, a sometimes frightening, sometimes gentle, always colourful man of uncertain age who speaks an enchanting dialect and whose memory gets worse with each passing day. When Michelino volunteers to help the old man by providing him with clever mnemonic devices to keep his memory alive, the boy soon finds himself obsessed with piecing together the eerie hodgepodge of Felice’s biography...a quest that leads to the uncovering of skeletons in Nazi uniforms in the attic, to Felice’s admission that he can hear the voices of the dead, and to a new perspective on Felice’s endless war against the insatiable local slugs, who are by no means merely a horticultural threat.
And yet nothing could be more fascinating to Michelino than Felice’s own secret origins. Where did he come from? Is he the victim or the villain of his story? Is he a noble hero, a holy fool, or perhaps the very thing that Michelino most wants and fears: a real-life monster.
Michele Mari is one of Italy's most renowned contemporary writers. He has published ten novels in addition to several short story and poetry collections, and has received prestigious awards including the Bagutta Prize, the Mondello Prize, and the Selezione Campiello Prize. A former professor of Italian literature at the University of Milan, he has translated classic novels by Herman Melville, George Orwell, John Steinbeck, and H. G. Wells. In a survey published by the magazine Orlando Esplorazioni in2015, Mari was ranked the contemporary Italian author most likely to be read by generations to come.
Brian Robert Moore has translated A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano, Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, and the work of other distinguished Italian authors. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a Santa Maddalena Foundation Fellowship,and the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature. For And Other Stories, he has already translated Michele Mari's You, Bleeding Childhood, which was the first book by Mari to be published in English.
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