Giacomo Sartori on Writing "Bug"

Giacomo Sartori on how his career as a soil scientist informed the writing of Bug.

My parents were great mountain lovers, and they were both mountaineers. After the war and before I was born they managed a nature refuge for years, though they both dedicated themselves to other things. So from birth I have been attracted to pristine spaces and nature. And I grew up in the countryside, even if close to a city, in a context that was very rural at the time. So it can’t be considered a coincidence that, though I distanced myself from my family, I ended up studying agronomy, despite my attraction to literature. 

In my scientific and technical career, parallel to my activity as a writer, I have always dealt with soil, mainly in natural areas, or in any case from an environmental point of view. And I have always wondered a lot about science, about its roles, its responsibilities, its limits, its mistakes…. Today we live in an age in which technology is presented to us as the most effective answer, and perhaps the only one, to all problems, and above all to environmental ones and to the lack of resources. My scientific and agronomist experience tells me that we cannot make nature do what we want, because it has very complex functions, and is difficult to study; we can try to live with it, but we cannot master it. This novel has these issues as its background, which seem to me to become more fundamental every day—also in light of the recent health crisis, which is probably the first episode in an even more dramatic crisis.

The novel centers on the story of a difficult boy who suffers from the absence of his mother, because I am a writer who has always investigated intimacy; but the story takes place between the pressures—in reality very distant from each other—of nature conservation and those of technoscience. Two characters deal with issues related to nature (the mother is a beekeeper, the grandfather a scholar of earthworms), and two others (the elder brother and the father of the young protagonist) are experts addicted to artificial intelligence. My story does not want to give answers, but only to show the frictions between different ways of seeing the world and of seeing the future, and the contradictions and unspoken truths of each viewpoint. But I'm not an essayist, and instead I use the weapons of comedy while staying faithful to my main interest, which remains showing very human characters struggling with the difficulties of life.

About the Author

The novelist, poet and dramatist Giacomo Sartori was born in 1958 in Trento in the Alpine northeast of Italy near the Austrian border. An agronomist, he is a soil specialist whose unusual day job (unusual for a writer) has shaped a distinctive concrete and poetic literary style. He has worked abroad with international development agencies in a number of countries, and has taught at the Università di Trento. He was over 30 when he began writing, and has since published seven novels and four collections of stories as well as poetry and texts for the stage. He’s an editor of the literary collective Nazione Indiana and contributes to the blog www.nazioneindiana.com.

Sartori took as his subject in his early novels Tritolo (TNT) and Sacrificio (Sacrifice) the stifling provincial atmosphere of the valleys of his native region and the twisted lives of its most vulnerable inhabitants. A recent novel Rogo (At the Stake), also set in the region, is written in the voices of three women from different historical periods who commit infanticide. The autofiction Anatomia della battaglia (The Anatomy of the Battle) about a young man’s effort to come to terms with and define his manhood against the model of his father, a committed Fascist, and the historical novel Cielo nero (Black Heavens), deal with fascism and its dark, persistent allure. Sartori’s shorter fiction includes the book of interrelated absurdist stories Autismi (Autisms, 2018) written in the voice of a person struggling to cope with the bizarre, baffling customs and expectations that all around him seem to share. The black humor and pessimism are reminiscent of Samuel Beckett. Several stories from Autismi have appeared in Frederika Randall’s English translation in The Massachusetts Review, and an excerpt from L’Anatomia della battaglia, also translated by Randall, appeared in The Arkansas International no 2. At present he lives between Paris and Trento.

About the Book

About the Translator

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Frederika Randall (1948–2020) was a writer, reporter, and translator. Among her numerous translations are Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian (2015); Giacomo Sartori’s I Am God (2019), and his forthcoming Bug (2021), both published by Restless Books; and two novels by Guido Morselli, The Communist (2017) and Dissipatio H. G. (2020). Randall received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and PEN/Heim Translation Fund and was awarded the 2011 Cundill History Prize, with Sergio Luzzatto, for the English translation of Padre Pio: Miracles and Politics in a Secular Age. She died in Rome in May 2020.