SASSO

A cultural anthropologist journeys to a village in southern Italy to explore the hell of “sassi” (cave dwellings) and of his own desires.

Sasso unfolds as a long letter the narrator writes to his pregnant girlfriend in New York City. Hauling the baggage of uncertain careers and troubled relationships, he and three others have come to Mancanzano to study the brilliant frescoes in a warren of prehistoric cave dwellings. Adorned by angels and saints, the frescoes now look down upon two dead, naked teenagers. Their teeth are chipped, their faces lacerated, the insides of their mouths caked with tufa, the porous, cool stone that turns up everywhere in Mancanzano (and, it seems, on nearly every page of this first novel). Ground up, the magical and medicinal stone becomes, variously, a talc that soaks up sweat or a dietary supplement that, if overused, turns into cement. Scraping away at the frescoes, the team uncovers images of bleeding cherubim and dead, gashed, nude humans. More teenagers, then dogs, turn up dead in the caves. Compiling an oral history of Mancanzano, the narrator finds his encounters turning equally dark. An old woman tells of going blind from staring at the sun for a vision of the Madonna. An old man exposes his flaccid genitals, then asks the narrator to hold him. Complying, the narrator supports the man as he defecates. In thrall to the violent and sensual life around him, the narrator begins a passionate affair with a young girl named Philippa,. Hinting that she may be pregnant, she reviles the narrator. The two begin hurling abuse at each other like lumps of tufa. Soon on trial for her murder, the narrator writes to his fiancée, expressing hope that his child will “understand the power of stone” in New York, “a city that is also composed of cells.”

An avalanche of portentous symbols, allusions, and tufa, tufa, tufa.