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140 pages, Kindle Edition
First published February 1, 2013
where can i go where i won't have to see any more of this slaughter, this blind and relentless torsion they call life?despite over a dozen works of fiction (novels and short stories), essays, and theater, italian author antonio moresco's distant light (la lucina) is the first of his books to appear in english translation. an ethereal, enigmatic tale radiating with incandescent imagery, distant light is the quiet, curious story of a hermetic mountain-dweller ("i have come here to disappear, in this desolate and abandoned village where i'm the sole inhabitant") drawn to a faint, yet steady light across the valley. with his inquisitiveness getting the better of him, the solitary narrator ventures forth to seek its source.
all these lives that become entrapped with each other, this continual creation of colonies to occupy more and more portions of territory and to take it from others. why? why?distant light flirts with the spooky and supernatural, yet doesn't stray far into the otherworldly realm. instead, moresco's narrator inhabits an existential milieu of seclusion and yearning – one shared by the young boy he encounters on his foray. distant light is a quiet, unassuming novel, and though its rewards alight more subtly, they're easily discernible amidst the fog, philosophy, and phantasmagorical. moresco writes beautifully and his english debut all but begs for subsequent translations.
"can their life be as unhappy as ours? and do pain and evil also bring some distraction for them, at least for a few moments, from unhappiness? do they too have that short, cruel dream that has been called love? could that also be inside something that exists somewhere else? does someone else exist in the middle of all these spheres of gas that burn in the deepest obscurity and these conglomerations that cool and calcify, with their mineral surfaces full of wounds and gashes, in the middle of all these dead experimental masses crammed into this vertigo that we have called space? alpha centauri, the star closest to our sun, is four light years away. the large magellanic cloud, the galaxy closest to our galaxy, is a hundred and sixty-five thousand light years away from our own solar system. and i am here, sitting on this metal chair that sinks lower and lower into the ground, in this place far away from the world, about the same distance from everything and from space and from time and from my life and from my death..."