DISSIPATIO H. G.

GUIDO MORSELLI

Translated by Frederika Randall

168pp. NYRB Classics. 13 [pounds sterling] (US $15.95).

Dissipatio H.G. begins two weeks after "the Event" and reconstructs what has just occurred. Everyone is gone; our narrator is entirely alone in an Alpine banking metropolis called Crysopolis. He doesn't know what happened because at the exact moment when everyone disappeared he was trying to kill himself in an underground lake. He had only rethought his decision after taking a draught of a particularly good Spanish brandy, sitting over the lake, "feet dangling in the dark".

In his posthumously published novel of 1977, Guido Morselli (1912-73) interleaves the unnamed man's exploration of an empty Europe with accounts of his retreat from the social world in the years before, beginning with his renunciation of a job as a newspaper columnist and a failing romance, followed by his clinical treatment for neurosis and the period of pastoral isolation that ensued. His ever-deferred attempt to "come to terms with the [new] situation" reads as both melancholic and absurd; much of the humour comes from his caustic takes on the sociological theories of alienation of Herbert Marcuse, Charles Reich and above all "Good old [Emile] Durkheim". He refers frequently to Durkheim's Suicide (1897), at one point disparaging the theorist's belief that, in the narrator's words, "we think only as a...