Winner of the 2008 Grinzane Cavour Prize
Winner of the 2025 PEN Translation Prize
“Slugs and monsters abound in the strange and compelling tale of 13-year-old Michelino, who, while summering at his grandparents’ estate near Lake Maggiore, becomes enthralled by the increasingly forgetful gardener, Felice. While devising tricks to help Felice keep his memory alive, the boy is soon forced to grapple with the skeletons of histories past.” —Ángel Gurria Quintana, Financial Times Best summer books of 2024: Fiction in translation
“Mr. Moore wonderfully reproduces Mr. Mari’s anagrams, mnemonic devices and puns. Verdigris is a delightful game, up until the moment it turns deadly serious.” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“This is a magical novel not to be missed.” —World Literature Today
“Mari is known as a master of old literary forms and languages, with stylistic mannerisms that he calls ‘literary vampirism’ … For lovers of the gothic and the supernatural there is much to admire in Michele Mari’s work. But what remains long in the mind is a feeling of extreme loneliness, regrets and longings for an irretrievable past, for loving family and accepting friends, which no amount of memories can return.” —Times Literary Supplement
“Moore’s translation is lively and inventive … It’s as easy for adults to rewrite history, Mari suggests, as it is for children to retreat into fantasy. Consequently, a strange world emerges, one in which ‘everything flows and nothing stays’. This ‘gothic fantasy’, as Mari has called it, can be read as a commentary on collective amnesia, a condition affecting not just contemporary Italy, where fascism is becoming a real threat again, but also societies all over the globe. As Europe’s far right raises its head, literature that exhumes ghosts of the past grows vital. If left undisturbed, they will keep haunting the future.” —Financial Times
“A pleasingly strange, crepuscular novel” —Irish Times
“The novel is an intriguing mystery ... Brian Robert Moore’s translation is astonishing work.” —Barry Pierce
“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
“The English version of this novel...is more than a translation. It is an Ovidian exercise, transforming what could have been baffling to Anglophone readers into a rich and captivating narrative” —Lee Langley, The Spectator
“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
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 Starone, 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
★ 2023-09-23
A curious teenager's conversations with an odd groundskeeper yield far more than he'd bargained for.
In 1969 in rural Italy, 13-year-old Michelino whiles away the early August days by peppering Felice, the groundskeeper of his grandfather's estate, with questions about the place and pestering him to stop killing the red slugs that populate the property. Plagued by the premature onset of hereditary memory loss, Felice agrees to pause his molluscan massacre in exchange for Michelino's help in developing mnemonic devices to remember basic facts of everyday life: fleece flower by the bedside to remember his name, black arrows directing him to the outhouse. But as Michelino's "maieutic maneuvers" grow ever more convoluted (a hammer and sickle somehow come to signify a rotten sausage?), the narrative takes a disturbing tilt. Felice reveals his knowledge of a secret room above a hayloft, and buried truths emerge involving Nazi officers, the manor's mysterious previous owners, and Felice's own enigmatic identity. Mari's signature approach to memory and childhood serves the storytelling well, and idiosyncratic elements intensify the novel's underlying tension: Felice's strangely endearing speech habits (“Firs’, we have t’ be fin’in’ ou’ me age"), Michelino's eclectic philosophical references (Lukács, Adorno, and Aristotle among them), and actual historical events described with painstaking specificity, such as a reference to an infamous football match that turned violent and the "swollen eye of Néstor Combin," a professional footballer. 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.
