Half way though the month, Snow, Dog, Foot is my belated first novella for #NovNov (Novellas in November)… and what an outstanding story it is. It won Italy’s Procida Isola di Arturo – Elisa Morante prize in the fiction section, and its translator J Ockenden won the 2019 Peirene Stevns Translation Prize.
As Stu tells us in his enticing review at Winston’s Dad, Snow, Dog, Foot was Morandini’s sixth book. Born in 1960, he was an Italian teacher of Latin and literature and is an author of novels and short stories. The list at Wikipedia shows us that he’s prolific, and as of 2023 had published eleven books. Only one of which has been translated, more’s the pity…
Snow, Dog, Foot with its strange title was the first book published for Peirene’s 2020 ‘closed universe’ theme (…).
What would drive a man to do that, to prefer to live a life of such squalor and privation?
Adelmo Farandola learned the advantages of solitude as a young man, during the time he spent as a fugitive in the woods, among rocky crags and in abandoned mineshafts. He retains vague, distant memories of this period. It was during the war, when the valleys were haunted by men in heavy greatcoats who muttered incomprehensible words as they lined up everybody they came across and shot them without much ceremony. Adelmo Farandola had fled into the mountains like many others who had sensed the danger in time and formed themselves into bands, but he soon went off on his own, wandering among abandoned farms and old mineshafts hidden by tree stumps, eating nothing for days on end except a few berries and leaves that he recognised. He never imagined that he would have to stay hidden for months. He thought it would be only a few days — he thought it would be exciting, like a dangerous children’s game.
Day and night he heard the echo of gunfire and he knew that each shot meant the death of another person like him, caught behind a wall, in a mountain pasture or at the bottom of a well. He had heard that the men in greatcoats were methodical and scrupulous, that they knew how to scour the mountainside with binoculars in hand, maps unfurled and the volume on the two-way radio turned all the way up. Sometimes he heard the crackle of those radios, which told him that the grey-coated men were close, really close, so he stopped breathing and tried to still his heartbeat so it couldn’t be heard. (p. 52)
He found a secondary tunnel of an abandoned manganese mine, and made himself a den in a space so well-concealed and so narrow that no one would ever think to look for him there. And he stayed there for the war years, staving off extreme hunger and cold and taking comfort in talking to himself and in imagining the voices of animals and objects ready and willing to reply.
When the story opens many years later he is an old man living in a rudimentary cabin high up on the mountain, He ventures down to the town only for supplies to see him through the winter months. On one occasion an old dog follows him home, and though at first he rejects the dog’s overtures, it eventually becomes a companion of sorts and the text reproduces their ‘conversations’ as Adelmo experiences them in his own personal reality.
His presence in the village is only fleeting, but lapses of memory and other odd behaviours noticed by the woman in the shop, send a ranger up the mountain in search of him. The ranger is young and perhaps inexperienced. He seems genial, but what was supposed to be a welfare check prompts Adelmo to flee further away because of the ranger’s enquiries about illegal hunting and an unlicensed gun. This only increases Adelmo’s paranoia, and he spends the winter snowed into a freezing shelter high up in the alps, where his supplies fail too soon because he is also (reluctantly) feeding the dog.
And then when the thaw begins, the dog finds a human foot protruding from the debris of an avalanche. As Stu says in his review, the story morphs from a portrait of mental dissolution into a chilling mystery. Who is this corpse, and how did he die?
It is not surprising that the translation was rewarded with a prize. It really is superb:
People imagine that a snow-covered mountain must be a silent realm. But snow and ice are noisy, mocking, unabashed creatures. Everything creaks under the weight of the snow, and the creaking takes your breath away, because it seems like the prelude to a devastating collapse. The sound of snow and ice settling echoes for a long time, travelling through the ground underfoot and through the air. The great avalanches speak in fearsome roars and in fierce hisses of displaced air that fill the listener with dread — but even the smaller landslides thunder and echo through the valleys, the sound vibrating between rock walls miles away from the actual point of collapse. (p. 56)
Highly recommended.
(Lisa Hill, ANZ LitLovers Litblog)
