Distant Light

January 18, 2016
“I have come here to disappear,” begins Italian writer Moresco’s mysterious new book. And indeed, its hermit narrator seems to have come to the right place: a desolate and abandoned village in an unspecified forest where his only companion is a crippled dog, and his only conversation is with the swallows. But he may not be as alone as thinks he is; an inexplicable light in the wood leads him to pay a visit to a leading UFO expert in search of answers. But instead of extraterrestrial visitors, he finds a young boy called Putty, who also lives alone, seemingly unsupervised in the forest’s heart, fretting over homework from a school we never see. As Putty and the narrator begin an enigmatic friendship, more questions come to the fore, as the narrator’s house is frequently rattled by tremors that, combined with the apocalyptic weather conditions, seem to indicate the story might be set at a precipice between worlds. Finally, an investigation into Putty’s past alerts the narrator to just how far off the beaten track he has strayed. Despite its fable-like structure and brevity, Moresco has Kafka’s power to unnerve, and Walser’s genial strangeness. Something like a supernatural modernist story, Distant Light’s real territory is dreams, where readers may find the book’s imagery still lingering.

December 15, 2015
Living in an abandoned village in order to "disappear," an unnamed man encounters a mysterious light across a deep ravine. Italian author Moresco, in his English language debut, creates a ghostly landscape imbued with a gentle creepiness, in which the man's "ears buzz in the total absence of sound" and yet furniture creaks, badgers rustle, and swallows screech and crunch on insects. Every object is alive and restless. The man marvels at plants sapping life from other plants and spores yet to "invent" themselves. Trees bend under the weight of chestnuts and the Earth itself shakes. Dwelling on the nature of "vegetal torment," its perpetual birth and rebirth, Moresco's story is slow to begin and slow to end, preferring a meditative quality, heaping questions upon questions, occasionally a beat longer than necessary. The story picks up with the man's investigation of the distant light. A stranger shoveling manure posits the light's source is alien, saying his goats ascended into a luminous, egg-shaped UFO. Instead, the man discovers a small boy living by himself in the woods, apparently self-sufficiently, and begins to visit him every few days. Their hesitant, budding relationship uncovers the pain of loneliness, the ephemerality of life, their insignificance in the universe--and the necessity of human connection. The story grows eerier as the man learns of the boy's night school, his frustration at being unable to read, his exercise books full of nonsensical text. Their mutual loneliness and the dreamlike quality of their world begin to suggest a kind of purgatory. Though the ending is appropriately inscrutable, it is somewhat disappointing in its tampered uncertainty. Despite this muteness, the imagery and language glow throughout. An unsettling and strangely tender novel.

COPYRIGHT(2015) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.