Claudio Morandini’s Snow, Dog, Foot (translated by J Ockenden) reminded me initially of Robert Seethaler’s A Whole Life as in its opening pages we meet the elderly Adelmo Farandola living alone in the mountains. He only rarely ventures down to the nearest village, despite enjoying listening to the band play on special occasions:
“But he soon stopped that because someone had come up to him, hand outstretched, and tried to engage him in conversation.”
He now only visits to stock up supplies for the winter; the description of one such trip demonstrating his deteriorating memory. “Forgotten something?” the lady behind the counter asks him, revealing that he had made the same trip only a few days before:
“A memory, albeit a rather vague one, begins to coalesce in his mind.”
The novel takes a more interesting turn on page 24, however, as Adelmo eats some wine-soaked bread:
“The dog’s tongue drips like a leaky tap… ‘Can I try a bit?’ he asks the man at last.”
The dog will be Adelmo’s companion throughout most of the novel, often more talkative than the man. Of course, the dog can be subsumed into a realist reading of the novel as an aspect of Adlemo’s imagination. Morandini even explains:
“In the war years Adelmo Farandola learned to find comfort in talking to himself and in imagining the voices of animals and objects ready and willing to reply.”
In the novel, however, the reader also hears the dog’s voice – the dog is a ‘character’ – and Morandini makes the reader further complicit in providing the dog with a back story.
“Ah, my shepherding years… I look back on them fondly.”
This makes the novel seem largely comic, which would fairly characterise the first half, even Adelmo’s determination to avoid contact with any other person. He is particularly suspicious of a ranger who speaks to him on a number of occasions, whom he sees as unnecessarily interfering – suggesting his dog should be muzzled, asking if he owns a gun, and wondering if he shouldn’t spend the winter in the village:
“He could throw stones at him from up here. He could cause a landslide and bury him beneath several tons of rubble.”
The novel takes a darker turn, however, when, having survived the winter, Adelmo and his dog discover a foot protruding from the snow and ice:
“It’s human foot, not a hoof, that the man and the dog can see sticking out from the debris of the avalanche.”
What has seemed like a rather gentle comic novel up to this point (well, as comic as a novel about a chronically lonely old man with dementia can be) becomes tense with the question of who lies dead under the snow:
“The more I look at this guy, the more he reminds me of that nice ranger who came to see us in the autumn.”
Adelmo’s failing memory means that he cannot be certain that he is not somehow responsible for the corpse, especially when he sees punctures on the man’s head that are “not the sort of wounds you get from an avalanche.” As the novel moves towards it violent and macabre conclusion Adelmo’s eccentricity becomes both more sympathetic and more desperate.
A Whole Life, admittedly much loved by many, left me puzzled by many readers’ reaction to the central character (and whether this was the author’s intention) – that is, they took the title as an affirmation rather than an ironic dismissal. My fear was that Snow, Dog, Foot would lead us down a similar road – one where an isolated and mentally infirm character is portrayed as somehow living a better life. In fact, this seems to have been exactly the trap Moradini sets for the reader, presenting us with a lovable eccentric only to slowly reveal the horror within.
