In everyday life – on a garden path, flowerpot or lettuce – I back rapidly away from slugs. I didn’t expect to confront them in literature, but in Michele Mari’s Verdigris they are present in abundance, from the first line:
Bisected by a precise blow of the spade, the slug writhed a moment longer: then it moved no more… slimy shame transformed into splendid silvery iridescence.
So, not a novel for one who shrinks from gastropod molluscs, you would think.
Yet I quickly found myself drawn into a remote corner of rural north Italy in 1969 where a lonely, bookish boy, Michelino, spends long summers with his emotionally unreachable grandparents. His only companion is Felice, the elderly handyman and gardener who wages ferocious daily war against the red slugs infesting the grounds. Speaking a slurred idiolect and scarred, ugly and illiterate, Felice is the unlikeliest of companions for a precocious 13-year-old who thinks in abstruse literary allusions.
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