Dissipatio HG by Guido Morselli

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 struggles and ambitions, but to find that the entire human race has evaporated in an instant is more than he had bargained for.

Guido Morselli’s arresting postapocalyptic novel, written just before he died by 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.

Dissipatio H.G. is a precocious portrait of our Anthropocene world, and a philosophical last will and testament from a great Italian outsider.

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I was hoping I'd enjoy this one; I generally enjoy post apoc, but this one wasn't for me.

It's very philosophical. Our narrator muses on the works of many philosophers, comparing their situations and beliefs to his own. The timeline skips around; it's mostly set after everyone in the world has mysteriously vanished into nothingness, but parts of it, without any warning, are set before.

The translation is pretty good, and this is some technical writing, but there's no depth to anything. Even quite late in the book, when the narrator has a couple of  (very brief) hysterical periods, it doesn't come across. I was reading it without feeling anything. One of the hysterical periods is brought on by his realising that dead bodies as well as living are gone, but the reason that's so horrifying is never explained, so from my point of view he's hysterical for no reason - or at least, I don't know why he's hysterical, he does have plenty of reason. He never gives any thought to the future, either; there are mentions of stale bread and gone off cheese, and he moves to a city and says that he will never return home, but he makes no plans for what he'll do when the fresh and canned food have run out - and, this being written in 1976, I'm fairly sure that canned food wasn't as common as it is now. Of course, maybe he just doesn't care, but still...

Unsatisfying, for me, but if you like your philosophy with a hint of mystery, this is the one for you.

Dissipatio HG publishes on the 1st December, 2020.