[New Vessel Press; 2025]
Tr. from the Italian by Anne Milano Appel
When Gerardus Mercator unveiled his now-famous map of the world in 1569, he called it Nova et Aucta Terrae Desciptio ad Usum Navigantium Emendata: A new and improved map of the Earth corrected for sailors. And it certainly was an improvement on maps of the time: sailors could now chart a straight path from point A to point B on the map and, so long as they maintained their course, would arrive at their destination as planned. The Mercator projection helped sailors navigate more easily, while maintaining the shapes of landmasses and bodies of water on the map. But the advances it offered for navigation came at the cost of proportion: it wildly distorted the sizes of things. On a Mercator map, Greenland appears as large as Africa, Alaska the same size as Australia. The Mercator projection revolutionized navigation, the way one gets from place to place, while giving its viewers a distorted, funhouse-mirror view of the world. Some distortion may be inherent to all two-dimensional maps, and perhaps to all forms of representation, as well. This is one of the central problems in essayist and critic Daniele Del Giudice’s brief, elliptical first novel A Fictional Inquiry, originally published in Italian in 1983 and newly translated into English by Anne Milano Appel, translator of dozens of novels and nonfiction books by twentieth-century and contemporary Italian writers. A slow-moving, contemplative detective story, A Fictional Inquiry uses the Mercator map and various modes of navigation to explore the relationships between representation and reality, literature and life, creating and being.
The novel explores these themes by way of travel, literal and figurative. Its unnamed narrator is searching for traces of a dead writer who never published anything, Roberto Bazlen (1902–1965). Most of the chapters are framed by the narrator’s journeys to and from Trieste and London as he meets with old friends and acquaintances of Bazlen, who ran in prominent Italian literary circles without publishing anything himself, giving up writing to lead an active life. For reasons that are never made clear to us, the narrator wants to know why Bazlen abandoned writing. His curiosity about Bazlen takes him on a literary pilgrimage of sorts, an unusual one where the writer’s oeuvre exists in the places and people he shaped and that shaped him and not in any written works. In picking up clues about Bazlen in his friends’ published works and oral accounts, the narrator hopes to find a point where “knowing how to be and knowing how to write perhaps intersect.” This question is intriguing enough to sustain both the narrator and the novel through its six chapters.
We don’t know if the narrator is a writer, or what personal stakes the question may hold for him. We don’t know what, if anything, he hopes to do with any answer he finds. We don’t even know what he’s searching for until we’re well into the novel. The narrator seems to be aware of his murky way of recounting his quest. When one acquaintance asks him why he’s looking for Bazlen, he reflects:
The problem is having to explain everything, in a situation like this, with a minimum of words. You have to eliminate “I have to” or “I’m here to,” pare down the auxiliaries, reduce the phrase to simple nouns—or to a noun—let the other person imagine the correlations. To strip away, until things speak for themselves, or are backed up by someone else; however, this does not come naturally to me.
Yet, stripping away words seems to come easily to him. While he often makes asides and reflections, as in the paragraph above, he leaves the dots unconnected. Right when we think we might get an answer out of him, as in this exchange with an acquaintance on the phone, he turns to metaphysical or aesthetic reflection. His spare narrative style contributes to the novel’s enveloping sense of mystery, which Del Giudice successfully sustains from chapter to chapter to keep the novel moving, even as it also makes it somewhat lifeless at times. Just like his motivations, the narrator himself remains largely an enigma to us from beginning to end. We learn virtually nothing about him, besides the odd, seemingly inconsequential detail, like the thickness of his beard. A man without qualities, he seems to have no background and few identifiable characteristics. As a result, the narrator is almost absent from the novel, largely present only in the traces of his thought: the short essayistic passages where he muses on what he observes and discovers. He even goes so far as to call himself a ghost, and there does seem to be something spectral about him.
In contrast, the cities he passes through on his investigation—Trieste and London—are richly detailed, all the more vivid in the face of the narrator’s ambiguous identity. The narrator combines a bird’s-eye view of each city with more personal, down-on-the-ground description, alternating between two modes of seeing a city and orienting oneself within it. He can describe, for instance, driving out of the city center in Trieste and toward a hospital on a hill, and the layout of the hospital buildings, while in the next paragraph noting details from inside the hospital: the glass door to the mezzanine, the “long greenish corridor,” the “feeling of something Austro-Hungarian.” He slips between the view of a cartographer and the view of a pedestrian. His ability to do so demonstrates his interest in focal points, in “angles of representation,” how the place from which one approaches something—whether a building, a body of water, a person—brings one to see and represent that thing in radically different ways. His constant movement places A Fictional Inquiry in a line of texts narrated by a walker, from modernists like Robert Walser and Fernando Pessoa to more contemporary writers like Sebald, but it still feels different from any of these books. Unlike many of those writers’ narrators, and unlike a true flaneur, the narrator always has a goal in mind. He wants to get somewhere. That might explain his interest in maps and navigation. In one passage, for instance, he provides a detailed description of how airline pilots navigate their course. This technical passage, which has little to do with the narrative, demonstrates the narrator’s tendency to break down everything he observes into its component parts, leaving nothing whole. In this novel, representation is a matter of collecting loose ends and leaving them loose.
A sense of disconnect is also apparent in the fragmentary way the characters speak. The narrator’s conversations with Bazlen’s acquaintances are often puzzling, with context and details left out. When he interviews a poet in a hospital, for instance, she describes first meeting Bazlen, then tells the narrator that “[y]ou have to keep books separate from grief,” a spontaneous assertion that goes unexplained. Later, a different acquaintance asks the narrator, “Do you know that at one time I wasn’t able to repeat something I had already said?” It’s unclear why such a thing happened to her, if it even did, or why she is telling the narrator about it now. In his thoughtful, essayistic way of recounting his investigation, the narrator is prone to such statements, too. When describing his visit to the poet in the hospital, he says, “I view madness as I do a dental disorder.” Statements and questions like these, which appear frequently in the novel, make their speakers seem less real, more like echoes of poets or philosophers than full, rounded characters. As a result, the novel often feels like a series of riddles or questions that stack onto each other without ever being answered.
Similarly, details about Bazlen pile up throughout the novel without giving us a clear view of who the man was or why he didn’t write. Early in the novel, the narrator even says that “[i]t’s hard to know what to do with all this.” Like the narrator, I found myself with questions. What do we do with a man who left traces of himself in his friends’ writings without actually writing himself? What do we do with a man who could have written but chose to live an active life instead? Why are writing and living even in conflict in the first place, for Bazlen or for anyone else? Bazlen is an ever-present figure in a novel where he never appears. We’re brought closer to him, to parts of a man—facts about him, impressions, anecdotes—but if it amounts to anything, it amounts to a partial truth, to a distortion. It amounts to a figure drawn on a Mercator map.
Noah Slaughter writes fiction and essays, translates from German, and works in scholarly publishing. He lives in St. Louis.
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