Guido Morselli

A fantastic and philosophical vision of the apocalypse by one of the most striking Italian novelists of the twentieth century. From his solitary buen retiro in the mountains, the last man on earth drives to the capital Chrysopolis to see if anyone else has survived the Vanishing. But there's no one else, living or dead, in that city of "holy plutocracy," with its fifty-six banks and as many churches. He'd left the metropolis to escape his fellow humans and their striving, but to find that the entire human race has evaporated in an instant is more than he had bargained for. Guido Morselli's arresting post-apocalyptic novel, written just before he died, a suicide, in 1973, depicts a man much like the author himself--lonely, brilliant, difficult--and a world much like our own, mesmerized by money, speed, and machines. He travels around searching for signs of life at the US army base--palm trees, convertibles, and missile bays under the roadway--and scouts the well-appointed kitchens of his alpine valley's grand hotels for provisions, all the while brooding on the limits of human vision: his own, but also that of humankind. Meanwhile, life itself--the rest of nature--is just beginning to flourish now that human beings are gone. A precocious portrait of our Anthropocene world and a philosophical last will and testament from a great Italian outsider.

A unique political coming of age story, now in English for the first time An NYRB Classics Original Walter Ferranini has been born and bred a man of the left. His father was a worker and an anarchist; Walter himself is a Communist. In the 1930s, he left Mussolini's Italy to fight Franco in Spain. After Franco's victory, he left Spain for exile in the United States. With the end of the war, he returned to Italy to work as a labor organizer and to build a new revolutionary order. Now, in the late 1950s, Walter is a deputy in the Italian parliament. He is not happy about it. Parliamentary proceedings are too boring for words: the Communist Party seems to be filling up with ward heelers, timeservers, and profiteers. For Walter, the political has always taken precedence over the personal, but now there seems to be no refuge for him anywhere. The puritanical party disapproves of his relationship with Nuccia, a tender, quizzical, deeply intelligent editor who is separated but not divorced, while Walter is worried about his health, haunted by his past, and increasingly troubled by knotty questions of both theory and practice. Walter is, always has been, and always will be a Communist, he has no doubt about that, and yet something has changed. Communism no longer explains the life he is living, the future he hoped for, or, perhaps most troubling of all, the life he has led.