DISSIPATIO H.G.The VanishingBy Guido Morselli

In Guido Morselli's eerie and fantastical 1977 novel, ''Dissipatio H.G.,'' a man discovers he has inexplicably survived the sudden disappearance of the human race. It's tough luck, given that he'd planned to drown himself in a cave the very night it happened. Instead, the unnamed narrator emerges to find himself alive and alone in the world, after an apocalyptic ambiguity he refers to as ''the Event.'' Descending from his remote village, he searches for survivors in Chrysopolis, a fictional mercantile city. There he finds not people, but rather ''a taste of eternity'': memories, emboldened animals, flickering apparitions and lush, unfamiliar silences.

The last man is a neurotic intellectual, another in the long line of modern literature's outsiders. A former journalist, he previously abandoned Chrysopolis and its crass materialism for the solitude of a mountain retreat. (A vanishing, then, before the vanishing.) Having grown used to his own company, he was already something of a crank. ''I'm afraid of people,'' he thinks, ''as I am of...