Summary: | Dissipatio H.G. is the last novel by Guido Morselli, written shortly before he committed suicide. In it an unnamed narrator/main character, a former journalist who has left his job in Chrysopolis - the "Golden City" -, ekes out an isolated existence in the Swiss mountains to escape from a world based on ambition and greed. At the beginning of the novel, his escape from the world, which he refers to as his fuga saeculi, is amplified and overturned by a sudden and complete dissipatio humani generis: all human beings have disappeared into thin air, and the narrator has become the last man left on Earth. Transporting it into a cosmic dimension, Morselli draws a real anatomy of solitude. However, the protagonist's detachment from humanity affords only partly an occasion for a new and deeper look at society, and at human nature. If the withdrawal from the word connected with more intense spiritual or intellectual experiences can be understood as a form of life, in describing its solipsistic apotheosis, Morselli outlines its bleaker limits, tracing - through a lucid organization of narrative spaces - a passional trajectory that winds its way through euphoric and dysphoric states.
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