Author(s): Michele Mari; Brian Robert Moore (Translator)

Novel | Translated fiction | Italy | And Other Stories

A lonely little boy's unlikely friendship with his grandparents' grizzled old groundskeeper leads him down the rabbit hole from a life lived solely in books to a wonderful and terrifying hell of long-buried secrets, shadowy partisans, murdered Nazis, thefts, lies, doppelgängers, bloodthirsty slugs, and the unquiet dead.

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.

Review: Winner of the 2008 Grinzane Cavour Prize ---- '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 ---- '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 ---- Praise for the Author ---- 'There's a Calvino-esque blend of the playful and the rigorous to You, Bleeding Childhood. A uniquely refreshing book . . . idiosyncratic, amusing and moving.' The Guardian ---- 'If I were to give a book award to a living Italian writer, man or woman, I'd pick Michele Mari.' Domenico Starnone, I-Italy ---- 'The greatest living Italian writer.' Andrea Coccia, Linkiesta ---- 'The charm that Mari exercises on his readers, from the most devoted to the most distracted, is incredible . . . More than anyone else, Michele Mari represents today a model of writer that seems on the point of disappearing - fully literary, lofty, in short, twentieth-century.' Sara Marzullo, Esquire

Prizes: Winner of Grinzane Cavour Prize 2008.

Author Biography: Michele Mari is one of Italy's most renowned novelists, poets, and translators. 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.