The Earth is Falling, Carmen Pellegrino trans. Shaun Whiteside, Prototype, 2024, pp.226, £12

It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, Anne de Marcken, Fitzcarraldo Editions, 2024, pp.132, £10.99

 

There is a telling moment in ‘The Builders’, one of the best-loved episodes of the 1970s sitcom Fawlty Towers. Basil Fawlty, the hotel’s preening and cowardly owner, having once again secretly employed the hapless workman O’Reilly against the strict instruction of his wife, Sybil, returns from a weekend away with her to be confronted with the horrifying results of O’Reilly’s work. Doors are missing, passageways blocked off, roof support joists dismissed as pesky regulatory inconvenience. Sybil, who can ‘kill a man at ten paces with one blow of her tongue’, will walk in at any moment. Basil rounds on his waitress, Polly, his eyes bulging in terror. ‘I’m a dead man!’ he wails. ‘Do you realise? You’re dead, too! We’re all dead!’

Two recently published novels embrace ‘death is not the end’ as both axiom and narrative foundation stone, and traverse the great beyond to dizzying effect. At times, you almost wish for a character like Fawlty, one uncommonly clear-sighted about the limits of his own mortality, to step in and enlighten the books’ displaced protagonists as to the reality of their newly altered states.

Both books arrive with compelling provenance. The Earth is Falling, Pellegrino’s 2015 debut and the winner of a PEN Translates Award in 2023, is her first novel to be translated from Italian into English (by Shaun Whiteside, whose attention to local idiom, the book’s naturalistic dialogue and often darkly comic worldview deserves huge credit.) It’s a slim but statuesque work. Its narrator, Estella, a de-frocked nun retuning after years away, is very much alive, though her supporting characters might best be described – perhaps unsatisfyingly – as ghosts. Unfurling across three distinct ‘acts’, it tells the tragic story of the fictional Italian village of Alento (‘An abandoned village that lives in memory’ is how Pellegrino described it in an interview with the Italian newspaper La Republicca in 2015) in a shifting timeframe across the early-mid twentieth century.

The area is under near-constant threat from landslide and Pellegrino introduces and scrutinises the characters who bring it to vibrant life. Estella is governess to the cruel Marcello de Paolis. As the surrounding hillside begins to rumble, she reaches an agreement with the family that when they, and the rest of the village, are finally forced to leave Alento – she will remain, and maintain their grand house:

‘I stayed in the de Paolis house, with the big building made of memories to keep me company, a building that grew bigger by the year and, when the last families left, was finally terrifying.’

Estella’s disconcerting vocation is not undertaken naively. In some way, you suspect, she might just help keep the village… alive? (In that La Republicca interview, Pellegrino mirrors her protagonist’s motivations: ‘We can fight against the desolation of things by keeping their memory alive, taking example from their strength of resistance to time.’)

Pellegrino’s challenge thus becomes to protect the taut membrane of her complex, character-rich, and decades-hopping story, and she executes it with ambition and finesse. The novel’s central section, in which Estella switches from the scene-setting present to relate the rise and fall of Alento via a series of key character-focused chapters, is a tour de force of historical storytelling. As families grow and dwindle amid the bloody impact of WWI and the rise of Italian facism, the effects of lineage, class and political alignment exert their influence as much as the ever-present natural threat in the hillsides above.

‘Sometimes the dead repay us, when they come home in the strangest forms,’ Estella reflects, and it’s this unwavering faith, central to the book’s premise, that triggers the events of the novel’s third and final act: a meal, prepared in the de Paolis house, to which the village’s former inhabitants are invited. ‘In the dark days I prepared the room, restoring a little order to the chaos.’ But, as the meal begins, there are signs that Estella’s intentions are well-intentioned but ill-conceived. ‘What is the point of remembering us if we are not even consulted?’ protests Lucia Parisi, the victim of cruel abuse in life and now, it would seem, in death. ‘These memories of theirs grant us no respite,’ says Libera Forti, a character we saw last as a young woman trapped in a spitefully arranged marriage. The book’s moral vigilance, it would appear, is broad enough to deliver a startling thematic rug-pull.

Anna de Marcken’s It Lasts Forever and Then It’s Over, slimmer still than The Earth is Falling (the two books amount to little more than three hundred pages between them), is brought to captivating life by its undead protagonist: a young woman learning to navigate the challenges of a zombie-strewn landscape. De Marcken’s desolate, seemingly contemporary setting is less specifically labelled than Pellegrino’s but there are just enough pointers (Starbucks, minimarts, a ‘Home of the Falcons’ sign) to place the action in what appears to be the Pacific north-west of the United States.

The novel follows 2020’s extraordinary The Accident: a spare and fragmentary multimedia exercise that combined short lyrical passages, photography and QR codes to tell a story that, according to de Marcken, is ‘not a story’. (That’s to be argued over, perhaps, but, much like its full- length follow-up, it has a lot to say about mortality, grief and how we occupy our space in our short time in this world.) De Marcken sets in urgent motion this deeply moving story of overarching loss with a very specific, and wholly bizarre, event to match: ‘I lost my left arm today. It came off clean at the shoulder. Janice 2 picked it up and brought it back to the hotel.’ A mere three sentences in and the novel’s concerns and intent are dispassionately revealed. Also on that first page, as if from nowhere: ‘I miss you.’ And then: ‘The end of the world looks exactly the way you remember. Don’t try to picture the apocalypse. Everything is the same.’

And we’re off. The book’s narrator is initially unnamed but then, in what emerges as standard practice for all of its similarly nameless characters, she offers a compromise: ‘Mine was Genevieve. I remember that, but not my actual name.’ She adds: ‘I miss your name. I’m sorry, but I have forgotten it, too.’ (Names become crucial markers in a book that expresses curiosity about not just identity, but also how best to navigate the path from knowing who we once were to an understanding of who we have become when, well… hunting the living for food becomes our norm.)

Genevieve, we quickly learn, is adrift among the undead, shored up in a hotel where she and a cast of deftly drawn and, no getting around this, larger-than-life characters learn to adapt to a new way of being. The undead, having adopted a series of formal routines to replicate the comfort of daily ordinariness, pepper their discourse with wry reflection. Marguerite, the closest thing Genevieve has to a friend, offers a resigned cod-philosophy. ‘None of this is real,’ she opines, more than once, before adding, ‘Some of it is real.’ When Genevieve finds a dead crow early on in the first chapter, Marguerite helps her fit the bird into her chest cavity. That’s potentially the kind of overt symbolism that might cause the wary reader to raise an eyebrow, but de Marcken is streets ahead, adroitly inverting corvid conventions. Here, the bird acts as a deadpan commentator, offering stark, three word judgements on every situation: ‘Sharp. Safe. Fold.’ Or, as Genevieve comes to realise, it represents ‘the fleeting sulfur proof of my continued existence.’

Previously over-cooked totems are reworked with a pleasingly light touch throughout: a ‘zombie novel’, for once, radical enough to not require the upper-case ‘Z’. No sooner has the bird been secured than Genevieve offers an observation that serves not merely to signal the character’s unflinching self-awareness but, more intriguingly, a through- line into the book’s, and de Marcken’s, overall project: ‘A hotel might have once been a metaphor for the body, for any transitory site. And now here we actually are, none of us sure when we checked in or whether this is actually our luggage.’ Also of note is de Marcken’s prose, which is coloured by an angular poetry: Genevieve observes ‘the vaulted roar’ of the ocean; a phone ‘pops open like a leak springing in the night sky’; fireflies are ‘a fleet of tiny unheeded Paul Reveres’.

Also at the hotel is Mitchem, a self-styled firebrand preacher. Genevieve ponders the impassioned addresses that he delivers to mixed, often heated, responses in the hotel conference room. ‘Life. We renounce that world,’ he roars. ‘Fuck the dead!’ his handful of acolytes respond. Mitchem’s leaflets promise salvation but his campaign is unclear. ‘I feel roused and tired at the same time,’ Genevieve confesses, preferring instead to muse on the US television show Madame Secretary and Tea Leoni’s character’s religious scholar-cum-CIA spy handler husband: ‘He would be able to explain the cult dynamics at work here. I muse about the writers’ decision to include in a show about international politics a character able to opine on theology and philosophy.’ De Marcken’s way with a droll aside (‘I am having a very long sleepless night,’ says Genevieve) ensures that for a book as often disturbing as it is upsetting, it is also very funny indeed. Readers might well find kinship between Genevieve and Sarah Wilby, the ghost narrator of Ali Smith’s Hotel World, who adopts an equally sardonic view of her plight: ‘Because now that I’m nearly gone, I’m more here than I ever was. Now that I’m silent forever, it’s all words words words with me.’

But Genevieve’s nights are disturbed – by dreams of her former lover, the ‘you’ to whom much of the developing narrative is addressed. ‘Lying in the dunes with you. Sound of the ocean. Sound of wind in the dune grass.’ Fuelled by sense-memory and longing, she heads west, to the coast: a journey both perilous and, for the reader, never less than gripping. On the way, there are set-pieces that would elevate the finest horror writing: the scene in which Genevieve tracks and kills a young couple on a golf course is genuinely shocking (‘ I carve off the soft belly meat, the easy cuts from her thighs, her calves. I take what I can carry.’), as is her capture and punishment by a lawless mob. But both are trumped by her encounter with a desperate mother she finds feeding her undead son, locked away in a remote woodland hut, parts of her own body. ‘It does not sound like what you think. There is no animal snarl. It is just the sound of eating.’ And the sound, again, of genre tropes being demolished.

Here, then, are two audacious and accomplished novels that speak at length, and with great eloquence, about the precarious limits of mortality and the uneasy, complex process of grieving. Reading one without reading the other would seem almost foolhardy. Their shared purpose, and their avowed concern for the dead (and, of course, the undead) sees them both dare to take issue with Thomas Mann’s not unreasonable assertion that ‘a man’s dying is more the survivor’s affair than his own.’ Or, as Cola Forti, the disaffected anarchist at the heart of The Earth is Falling, contends at that final, eerie dinner, ‘the past belongs to the dead’. It would take an unsympathetic reading indeed to find reason to disagree.