Verdigris

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.

Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal

“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.”

World Literature Today

“This is a magical novel not to be missed.”

Times Literary Supplement

“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.”

Financial Times

“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.”

Irish Times

“A pleasingly strange, crepuscular novel”

Barry Pierce

“The novel is an intriguing mystery . . . Brian Robert Moore’s translation is astonishing work.”

Asymptote

“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.”

Kirkus Reviews, starred review

“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.”

Asymptote

“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.”

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.”

“breathe” in one’s soul for days, as though it were to a living thing

Stefano Giovanardi, la Repubblica

“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.”

and after which, too

“There are books before which there came other books, and then there are books before which

The Guardian

“There’s a Calvino-esque blend of the playful and the rigorous to You, Bleeding Childhood. A uniquely refreshing book . . . idiosyncratic, amusing and moving.”

Domenico Starone, I-Italy

“If I were to give a book award to a living Italian writer, man or woman, I'd pick Michele Mari.”

Andrea Coccia, Linkiesta

“The greatest living Italian writer.”

fully literary, lofty, in short, twentieth-century.”

“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

About the Author

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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