God's Dog E-Book

Diego Marani

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

First adventure for Domingo Salazar, a Dominican monk, who is a Vatican secret agent

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Leseprobe

Praise for Diego Marani

New Finnish Grammar

New Finnish Grammar won 3 literary prizes in Italy: the Premio Grinzane Cavour, Premio Ostia Mare and Premio Giuseppe Desi. The Dedalus translation by Judith Landry won The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize and was shortlisted for the Independent Foreign Fiction Award, The Best Translated Book Award and the Europe Book Prize.

“It is about loss of language, disorientation and survival in a state of translation. Its hero is constructed only by language – he’s a kind of replicant. The novel is melancholy, wide-ranging and sensitive, and its many inventive strands placed Judith Landry in a similar position to the protagonist’s in many ways, since the story required her to carry across Finnishness as well as Italian, and to convey the sense of profound estrangement that the novel inhabits. The plotting sets one story inside another, including retellings of the Kalevala and dream journeys of the Nordic shamans. It is a highly original, uniquely imagined work. In the words of one of the judges, ‘it’s a meditation on the whole phenomenon of language-learning and foreignness’.”

Marina Warner at The Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize

Award Ceremony

“It was, naturally, the flatness of the title that attracted me: it bespoke, in its quiet confidence, a deep, rich and eventful inner life. And besides, I have some inkling of what Finnish grammar is like: fiendishly complex, basically, and related to no other languages on earth save Hungarian and Estonian (I simplify). Learning Finnish involves not only beginning to appreciate the most beautiful of languages, but grasping, among many, many other things, 15 cases for nouns, such as the inessive, the elative, the ilative, and, everyone’s favourite, the abessive. I will return to the abessive in a minute. Deep and rich, did I say? That isn’t the half of it. I can’t remember when I read a more extraordinary novel, or when I was last so strongly tempted to use the word ‘genius’ of its author.”

Nick Lezard’s Choice in The Guardian

“A wounded sailor is found on a Trieste quay – amnesiac, unable to speak and with nothing to identify him except a name tag pointing to Finnish origins. A passing doctor resolves to teach him Finnish to restore his memory and rebuild his identity. Charming and beguiling.”

Books of the Year in The Financial Times

“… an entrancing, disturbing exploration of the limits of speech and self.”

Boyd Tonkin in The Independent

“Beautifully written and translated, and beautifully original.”

Kate Saunders in The Times

“Marani has created a staggering study of loss and an act of retrieval that is heroic… Marani’s moving novel about the brutal displacement imposed by war and fate achieves consummate emotional intelligence. The sailor is left wondering how on earth he ended up in Trieste in the first place. He never unravels the truth; the doctor does and that is his share of a very human tragedy.”

Eileen Battersby in The Irish Times

“The title is odd, the cover is grey and the author is a besuited Eurocrat. But beneath these unflamboyant exteriors lie a colourful story. It has taken 10 years, the dedication of a small UK publisher and a perfect-pitch translation to deliver Diego Marani’s first novel in English. When it came out in Italian, reviewers called it a masterpiece and it won several prizes. Since then Marani has written five more novels and become a Euro-celebrity.”

Rosie Goldsmith in The Independent

“Judith Landry is to be congratulated on her seamless translation from the Italian, and Dedalus for introducing English readers to a fascinating writer.”

Gabriel Josipovici in The New Statesman

“One somehow knows that this couldn’t have been written by an English writer. It has a thoroughly European sensibility: intellectual, melancholy, mysterious, imbued with a sense of tragedy and history.”

Brandon Robshaw in The Independent on Sunday

“… a thoughtful, idiosyncratic book and, in its utter disdain for the conventions of literary realism, entirely to be applauded.”

Joanna Kavenna in The Literary Review

“There is an unyieldingness at the heart of Diego Marani’s novel. He presents a world where heroism is expended in a futile task, friendship is sacrificed to despair, and help is rendered in such a way as to further the disaster. Yet this book is full of riches: a landscape so solidly created one can hear the ice crack, a moving examination of what makes a human being, and a restless brooding over the ideas of memory, belonging and identity (all three main characters are in some way lost). It is written in mirror-smooth prose and superbly translated. The story, finally, can’t fail.”

Anita Mason in The Warwick Review

“Don’t be put off by the unwelcoming title: this is an extraordinary book, as good as Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient and with a similar mystery at its heart.”

Cressida Connolly in The Spectator’s Books of the Year

“… we soon forget we are reading an English translation of an Italian novel. Sheer narrative vim is one reason for this… What gives New Finnish Grammar its true interest, however, is its evocation of a place and language foreign to the author yet, to all appearances, intimately familiar.”

Oliver Ready in The Times Literary Supplement

“As well as raising questions concerning psyche, identity and nationality, Sampo’s confused agony is quite simply one of the most incisive reflections of the trauma that befell Europe during that period that one might ever read.”

Oliver Basciano in ArtReview

“I know that it is a book that I will be thrusting into peoples hands for years to come urging them to buy it, read it and spread the word. It is the least that I can do for the pleasure that it has given me.”

Broad Conversation from Blackwell’s Bookshop in Oxford

This book has been published with the support of Ministero Affari Esteri Italiano and Arts Council England, London.

Contents

Praise for Diego Marani

Title

Dedication

Diego Marani

Judith Landry

Chapter I

Chapter II

Chapter III

Epilogue

The Last of the Vostyachs

Copyright

Diego Marani

Diego Marani was born in Ferrara in 1959. He is a policy officer of the European Commission in charge of the European multilingualism policy. He is the inventor of the mock-European language Europanto in which he has been writing columns for newspapers and magazines all over Europe for many years. His collection of short stories in Europanto, Las Adventures des Inspector Cabillot, has been published by Dedalus.

He is the author of six novels including the highly acclaimed New Finnish Grammar and The Last of the Vostyachs.

Dedalus will publish his third novel The Interpreter in 2015.

Judith Landry

Judith Landry was educated at Somerville College, Oxford where she obtained a first class honours degree in French and Italian. She combines a career as a translator of works of fiction, art and architecture with part-time teaching.

Her translations for Dedalus are: New Finnish GrammarandThe Last of the Vostyachs by Diego Marani, The House by the Medlar Tree by Giovanni Verga, The Devil in Love by Jacques Cazotte, Prague Noir: The Weeping Woman on the Streets of Prague by Sylvie Germain and Smarra& Trilby by Charles Nodier.

Disclaimer

The facts and characters in this novel are purely imaginary. Any similarity to the names of real people, or real events, is therefore simply a matter of chance.

I

‘My name is Domingo Salazar, I was born on the feast of Saint Dominic and brought up by the Dominican Fathers. I am a policeman, I see to it that the laws of our Holy Mother Church are respected and I work for the worldwide spread of that same Church. I never knew my parents, but from the colour of my skin I think they must have been Caribbean, or at least of mixed race. The fathers found me beneath the rubble of the orphanage of the Holy Cross, in Haiti, in 2010, and brought me to Italy. I grew up in the boarding-school run by the Dominican sisters of Saint Imelda, I studied at the patriarchal monastery in Bologna and then at the Papal Police Academy in Rome, which I left with the rank of inspector in the fifth year of the reign of Pope Benedict XVIII.’

He had developed this mania for diary-keeping as a result of the time he had spent with the nuns. ‘Time to get writing!’ the mother superior would say after tea, throwing open the grey door to the wood-panelled main hall. You still wrote with pen and paper in those days, in an exercise-book backed with black cloth which was chained to the desk, and which the sisters would read through later. So this diary had become a detailed account of his life, divided up into years. But Domingo Salazar would always copy out those first same sentences in every new exercise-book he began, as though to remind himself of who he was.

It was almost time for his appointment. Outside it was already dark. He had slept much of the afternoon; he had thrown himself on to the bed the moment he’d arrived, without even opening his suitcase. His flight had left at dawn, and he’d spent the whole previous night writing, as he always did. He washed himself in cold water, then shaved and dressed slowly in front of the mirror in the bathroom. He picked up his pistol holster from the chair and strapped it on under his arm. He didn’t like the sound of this new mission. He didn’t yet know much about it, but hunting down angels of death was a job for an ordinary municipal policeman, not an inspector like himself. Those Free Death Brigades struck him as amateurs, hot-heads with few means and even less experience. For all he knew, they might not even be organized into a proper group; they were stray dogs embarking on wild-goose chases. But orders were orders, and at seven o’clock he would learn further details about his assignment from the vicar.

He arrived at Sant’Andrea della Valle just as evening mass was ending. The priest gave the blessing and the faithful started trooping out. Salazar went up to the confessional to the right of the nave. The curtain was half-open, but the priest’s seat was empty, as was the one in the other confessional to the left. He walked up and down, pretending to examine the frescoes, then went back into the apse. By now the church was empty, except for an altar-boy who was putting out the candles. Salazar decided to go and kneel before one of the two confessionals at random, imagining that the vicar, were he in the church, would come and join him. An agent and his vicar must never see or know each other; they were not to use mobiles or email; communication between them had to be exclusively oral. This was the number one safety rule for the secret agents of the papal police. The meeting-place was a confessional in the church referred to in the mission order, itself the only written document – unsigned – which would remain in the registers of the barracks to which the agent in question belonged. When an agent on a mission lost contact with his vicar, he had to present himself at the nearest Swiss Guards post for an identity check. That was the only way he could be reinstated in the corps. Otherwise he himself became an outlaw, and might be eliminated. Salazar went back into the nave and up to the nearest confessional, the one on the left. Coming from the chapel, he couldn’t see the seat but, as he approached, he saw two black shoes on the footstool. Well, he thought, the vicar’s here at last. He was about to kneel down when the purple curtain was nudged aside by an elbow; for one brief instant, Salazar saw the fingertips of two white hands holding a glass bulb, witnessed the delicate gesture made by a one-eyed man slipping his prosthesis into an empty socket. Then the curtain was almost closed again, and the man’s face was sunk in shadow. Embarrassed by his unintentional intrusion, Salazar took a few steps backwards before going to kneel down, hoping that the vicar had not noticed anything. He could hear breathing through the openwork grille. As agreed, he recited the Credo, gave his registration number and then waited, in silence.

‘Inspector Salazar, I know you to be a faithful soldier in the service of our Holy Mother Church. I know your superiors, and they have confirmed your gifts in this regard. Furthermore I know you to have an excellent record, a decoration and various recommendations. I also know about your activities in Beirut and I congratulate you on them. We could do with more agents with such initiative! If I have called you here from Amsterdam, it is because I have a delicate task to entrust to you. You see, of all the dangers threatening our Holy Mother Church, none is more terrible than the practice of free death, which is becoming ever more widespread in this depraved world of ours. Euthanasia, as miscreants and scientists refer to it, destroys what God holds dearest, namely, the life He has given us. Euthanasia does away with the mystery of pain, which should be so revered. It’s not just a question of dogma, Salazar. Our hold on people’s consciences is also at stake. If men cease to fear death, or begin to regard it as something run-of-the-mill, our sway over them is seriously threatened. We are already conducting an active campaign of propaganda and dissuasion, but it’s no longer enough. What is called for is repression, carefully handled, and above all covert. People must not be aware of the restraints which bind them. The first part of your mission will be this, Salazar. You will inspect the hospitals in the fourth zone and keep an eye on such terminally-ill patients as might be seeking death. You will need to know everything about them, every last detail of their lives. You will have to glean information about their relatives, their friends, their intimate ties. You will have to delve into their past and know their every ambition and achievement. And also what they own: because, as you well know, inspector, the law authorizes the Church to seize the goods of those who die an unnatural death, and this is a powerful weapon in our armoury. Even the most ardent euthanasiast thinks twice before seeing his own children disinherited. You will also keep a close eye on the medical staff. As we know, despite the purges, many abortionists are still active within their ranks. Even the smallest detail should be taken into account, Salazar. You will have to keep the closest watch on every dying man. You will have to be able to tell from their expressions if theirs is willing suffering, or if they are rebelling against their fate. That is when they fall under the spell of the fanatics. We know that euthanasiasts make converts in hospitals. There they have a captive audience, and it is easy to convince sick people that they might wish to hasten their own end. But if you succeed in breaking this vicious circle, then we shall deprive them of their main sources of financial support. Because – and it is important to remember this – the sick actually pay to have themselves disposed of! It is only by thwarting their hold over sick people that we shall ultimately succeed in routing the angels of death!’

The vicar was gripping the handrail of the confessional with such force that it positively creaked. Even through the brass grating, Salazar felt the priest’s breath on his face. It was that smell of musty material and mouthwash which were subsequently to inform him of the vicar’s presence.