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by Michele Mari
An unusual coming-of-age tale from one of Italy's most renowned contemporary writers.
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 colorful 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.
"A curious teenager's conversations with an odd groundskeeper yield far more than he'd bargained for [...] Kudos to translator Moore, whose consummate conversion allows readers to luxuriate in the language of even deceptively minor moments: "amid the heads of lettuce, languished the halved cadavers of red slugs." A gripping, beguiling, occasionally discomfiting, and utterly fascinating tour de force." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Mari and Moore are returning with Verdigris, a novel that further displays Mari's masterful construction of mystery and fantasy with the story of a young boy, Michelino, and his developing friendship with a strange groundskeeper, Felice." —Asymptote
"One reads it quickly, in one go, but then it stays to "breathe" in one's soul for days, as though it were to a living thing—just like the turquoise poison referenced in the title, once it's dissolved in water. A writer of great talent, Mari seems to have even outdone himself." —Carla Benedetti, L'Espresso
"The theme of the 'double', in its various forms, is a favorite subject of the modern Western literary imagination (from Hoffmann to von Chamisso, from Stevenson to Wilde, and many others). But no writer, I believe, has managed to conceive in this regard what Michele Mari offers us in his new novel, Verdigris." —Stefano Giovanardi, la Repubblica
"There are books before which there came other books, and then there are books before which—and after which, too—there's nothing else." —Giorgio Vasta, Nazione Indiana
This information about Verdigris was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
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 in 2015, 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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