I have a pet theory; maybe it’s more of a stump speech for a soapbox. However you’d prefer to categorize it, the gist is fundamentally the same: criticism lost something when explainer culture came to dominate all sorts of cultural matters. That doesn’t mean that I’m morally opposed to a good analysis of a book, film, or television series. It does mean, however, that a little part of me dies every time I type the title of a movie or book into a search engine and am given the suggestion of “ending explained.”
In 2001, Salon published an extensive analysis of David Lynch’s film Mulholland Drive, making a compelling argument that the narrative was, in fact, a puzzle to be solved. And while I’ll concede that the article is one of the better examples of its kind, there’s something about it — and, more broadly, the descendants that have been populating websites the world over in the decades since then — that gets under my skin. Namely, this way of analyzing art casts aside the possibility that narrative ambiguity might be present for a reason other than to bewilder the reader en route to solving the mystery like an Encyclopedia Brown case. Because here’s the thing: on its own, ambiguity can be a powerhouse device when handled correctly. (It can also be infuriating when handled badly.) And that, in turn, leads us to Verdigris.
Written by Michele Mari and translated into English by Brian Robert Moore, Verdigris is, on the surface, a familiar kind of story: the sort of coming-of-age tale in which the protagonist befriends someone older who offers them valuable lessons and treasured memories. Verdigris is kind of like that, and it’s also kind of terrifying — made clear in the novel’s first sentence which describes a slug being chopped in half with a shovel and then dying.
The person doing the bisecting is Felice, an older man whose physicality is described in a series of characteristics: his weight, a scar across his face, a birthmark, and a bluish tinge on his hands that’s the result of the verdigris he spreads across plants. Our narrator is Michelino, age 13, whose grandparents employ Felice and who finds himself increasingly obsessed with him:
“Because he loved me, that creature, and to be loved by such a monster is the best possible protection from the horrific world. Sure, he besmirched himself with heinous acts such as the killing of slugs or the skinning of rabbits, whose gory pelts he hung on tree branches without any concern for my tender age; but I was intelligent enough to understand that, to a monster, some concessions must be made.”
It’s also clear that Felice is not well; in an early chapter, he asks Michelino to remind him of his own name. The year is 1969, the place is northern Italy, and some of Felice’s stories seem to hint at something untoward happening during the Second World War. It’s not hard to see why Michelino’s interest in this man would be so piqued — and it’s not hard to imagine a more conventional version of this novel in which Michelino’s search for answers leads to him unearthing ties between the small town where his grandparents live and world historical events. And while this novel follows some of those basic narrative beats, it still remains fundamentally stranger than that — due in no small part to the way that Mari employs ambiguity throughout.
First, there’s the matter of Felice’s failing memory, which initially seems to be some sort of early-onset dementia but turns out to have another potential cause revealed later in the book. There’s also the fact that our narrator, a self-described “connoisseur of monsters,” is not terribly worldly and still holds out hopes that the world will prove to be more uncanny than it seems. There’s a moment about halfway through the novel where Michelino seems to entertain the notion that Felice may have a preternaturally long lifespan. It seems surreal, but then — we’re in the realm of monsters here. Who’s to say what is and isn’t possible?
Verdigris also memorably ventures into both the Gothic and the phantasmagorical. As he ventures further into Felice’s history — and the history of his grandparents’ home — Michelino begins digging up the lawn. Below it, he finds over a dozen skeletons, all showing the telltale impact of bullets. Late in the novel, Michelino and Felice have a moment that can best be described as a kind of psychic communion. Michelino discovers a series of bottles that hold a substance that behaves a lot like blood. And then there are the slugs, which act as both Felice’s bane and a subject of morbid curiosity for Michelino.
Which explains this moment, when Michelino examines a barrel that had previously been home to “thousands and thousands of red slugs,” which he dispatched a few chapters earlier with a substantial amount of verdigris.
“[I]t confirmed what I expected: the amalgam of slugs and verdigris had become as hard as a rock. However, on the surface, caked like cooled lava, new slugs now crawled unscathed, slugs that therefore couldn’t have risen from the earth underneath the barrel.”
Has Michelino discovered a new species of slug with miraculous properties of spontaneous generation? Is something genuinely supernatural happening here? Or are we simply witnessing the flawed memories of a child being set down decades later? The ambiguity hovers over the proceedings, contrasting nicely with the visceral charge of the imagery. And, let’s be honest: it doesn’t get much more visceral than a barrel full of slugs.
There are two seemingly conflicting impulses at the center of Verdigris. One is the way in which it evokes childhood — a state of mind abounding with mystery and potential. A narrator recalling their own childhood — as is the case here, with both Michelino’s and Felice’s reminiscences — will be inherently fallible, limited by the passage of time and the gradual erosion of memory. In nominal opposition to this is the role of a storyteller, whose job is often to place a series of events in a specific order to tell a specific narrative.
You may have noted some similarities between the name of its narrator and that of its author. In an afterword to this edition, Brian Robert Moore confirms that Mari drew on his own youthful experiences (and his interaction with the inspiration for the character of Felice) in writing this. And the idea of this novel as a work of autobiographical fiction adds yet another layer to the proceedings; even as we readers experience Michelino processing the information he has learned and seeking answers to them, we’re also aware of Mari’s own arrangement of these disparate pieces.
“Everything fit together quite well, as a matter of fact,” Michelino muses late in the novel, as he attempts to come up with a unified theory of everything he has learned from Felice and others. And then, just as swiftly, he contradicts himself, pointing to no less than five things that this theory in no way accounts for. It also helps to explain the role that both Communism and fascism (and, more broadly, politics) play in Verdigris — what are political ideologies, after all, if not attempts to impose a coherent story on a world that’s a little more unruly than most theorists would like?
For all that this novel abounds with dizzying moments — from the slugs and bottles of blood to the role a family of exiled Russian aristocrats play in its pages — it is, at its heart, a forensic story about the limitations of forensic stories. Michelino’s search for answers is not undertaken to right a historical wrong or to save someone’s life. Instead, it’s about the act of discovery in its own right. In the end, the ambiguity turns out to be part of the point; in the end, it’s the unexplained moments that give this novel its power — and its enduring mystery.
[Published by And Other Stories on January 2, 2024,216 pages, $19.95 US, paperback]