Synopses & Reviews
A timely, hilarious, and inventive novel by the author of I Am God about a family of misfit savants that explores (dis)ability, artificial intelligence, and the interdependence of technology and the natural world, narrated by the family’s deaf youngest son.
Growing up deaf, the young narrator of Giacomo Sartori's novel Bug is hyper-attuned to the vibrations of the atoms in the air and the mental weather in those around him. He has a hard time focusing on what adults want him to, though, and sometimes bites people when agitated. Yet he's hardly the only unique one in his brood. His tech-genius older brother is called IQ in public and Robin Hood in the hackersphere, where he breaks into the systems of the pesticide corporation responsible for decimating his mother's bees. Their semi-estranged father is an engineer who profiles consumers for Nutella, which, our narrator knows, serves as a cover for his real job of pinpointing terrorists. Though divorced, he's moved back into the converted chicken coop where the family lives. They're visited by their grandfather, a retired anarchist now working on a magnum opus about worms. There's certainly enough going on in the family before their mother gets sideswiped by a semi truck and ends up comatose.
In his mother's silence, our narrator decides that if he can become better behaved, he'll make her emerald eyes snap back open. His speech therapist and confidante, Logo, takes his sign-language dictation as he relates the events of his days and his thoughts to his mom. He tells her about the artificial intelligence robot his brother is designing, of their battle with the neighbor (he of the pesticides), and the smart beehive they've built for her. And his new mysterious friend, Bug, who shows up on the computer one day and seems very familiar with the family... With the warm satirical humor and intelligence that made readers fall in love with his novel I Am God, Giacomo Sartori weaves a dense dysfunctional family story like no other, weighted with searching questions about how we deal with technology, the earth, and each other.
Review
"Italian novelist Sartori (I Am God) delivers a witty tale of family resilience and a dangerous, homemade AI bot... This is worth a spin." Publishers Weekly
About the Author
The novelist, poet and dramatist Giacomo Sartori was born in 1958 in Trento in the Alpine northeast of Italy near the Austrian border. An agronomist, he is a soil specialist whose unusual day job (unusual for a writer) has shaped a distinctive concrete and poetic literary style. He has worked abroad with international development agencies in a number of countries, and has taught at the Università di Trento. He was over 30 when he began writing, and has since published seven novels and four collections of stories as well as poetry and texts for the stage. He's an editor of the literary collective Nazione Indiana and contributes to the blog www.nazioneindiana.com.
Sartori took as his subject in his early novels Tritolo (TNT) and Sacrificio (Sacrifice) the stifling provincial atmosphere of the valleys of his native region and the twisted lives of its most vulnerable inhabitants. A recent novel Rogo (At the Stake), also set in the region, is written in the voices of three women from different historical periods who commit infanticide. The autofiction Anatomia della battaglia (The Anatomy of the Battle) about a young man's effort to come to terms with and define his manhood against the model of his father, a committed Fascist, and the historical novel Cielo nero (Black Heavens), deal with fascism and its dark, persistent allure. Sartori's shorter fiction includes the book of interrelated absurdist stories Autismi (Autisms, 2018) written in the voice of a person struggling to cope with the bizarre, baffling customs and expectations that all around him seem to share. The black humor and pessimism are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. Several stories from Autismi have appeared in Frederika Randall's English translation in Massachusetts Review, and an excerpt from L'Anatomia della battaglia, also translated by Randall, appeared in The Arkansas International no 2. At present he lives between Paris and Trento.
Frederika Randall grew up in Pittsburgh and has lived in Italy for more than 30 years. A journalist and translator from Italian, she has written cultural reportage for numerous US and Italian publications. She translated the epic novel of the Risorgimento, Ippolito Nievo's Confessions of An Italian, fiction by Guido Morselli, Luigi Meneghello, Ottavio Cappellani, Helena Janeczek, Igiaba Scego and Davide Orecchio, and three volumes of nonfiction by historian Sergio Luzzatto. Awards include a Pen-Heim grant, and with Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature.