Praise
Halfway between fairy tale and science fiction, between religious and sacrilegious, between poetry and philosophy, this book by Antonio Moresco looks with careful but compelling insistence at the mystery of what happens in โthe dark funnelโ of a life and the very material that makes literature.
It is a Canticle of the Creatures re-examined and modified with the eye of Galileo and the tragic vision of Leopardi, a prayer without religion but full of human religiosity. This small enchanting book is a modern De rerum natura of lyrical biology. Moresco is not only one of the greatest Italian writers, he is also the ultimate poet.
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Despite its fable-like structure and brevity, Moresco has Kafkaโs power to unnerve, and Walserโs genial strangeness. Something like a supernatural modernist story, Distant Lightโs real territory is dreams, where readers may find the bookโs imagery still lingering.
The imagery and language glow throughout. An unsettling and strangely tender novel.
Antonio Moresco offers an otherworldly story of isolation
It's wonderful [...] wonderful, Distant Light [...] it's a magnificent novel, so focused, and unique--totally unique, [Moresco's] writing is like no one else's.
[Distant Light is] an anomaly in an age of fast-paced stories. Akin to Anais Ninโs sensual explorations in A Spy in the House of Love, Rilkeโs The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, which limns depression, and Woolfโs attempts to capture the incandescence of existence, Morescoโs story delves into life and death, and the spaces that occur between the two.
Distant Light is a meditation on the in-between state of existence, of death present in the living and the living in death.
"[Distant Light] is a poetic account of one man attempting to disappear and also find his place in an increasingly savage world...Itโs a novel where questions are posed, and answers are rarely given...[it] should be read slowly in order to appreciate the poetic encounters of nature."
"A short novel full of rich prose and symbolism and yet another example of the fantastic literature being produced by Italian authors over the past decade or so. โDistant Lightโ is a hard novel to describe โ surreal, dense, probing โ itโs the kind of novel that will keep you thinking about it long after you read it."
Translator Richard Dixon has done an excellent job of reproducing the simplicity and colloquial quality of Morescoโs prose. Heโs unafraid to use verb contractions and stays neatly clear of cognates, leaving the text free of those Latinate words that so often sound too elevated or abstract in English translations from Italian. The strange, vaguely metaphysical import of the story is offset by the simplicity and clarity of the register, and he never betrays that.
[A] profound philosophical meditation on life and death... Dixonโs translation works wonders in English, while preserving the textโs own magic... [W]e are introduced to another, unexpected, invisible realm within our midst, a realm essential to Morescoโs literary imagination. But to say more is to reveal the great mystery at the heart of this text. And it is a mystery to be savored and pondered.
Extras
Antonio Moresco’s Patrie Impure: Italia, autoritratto a piรน voc was excerpted as “The Pigs” by Words without Borders.
A review by Nathalie Crom of the French translation appeared in Tรฉlรฉrama in October 2014 and can be found here.