L'Orto Americano by Pupi Avati

 

L'Orto Americano

by Pupi Avati

Pupi Avati is best known as a film director. His prolific and highly varied output includes several horror movies spread out over his long career. In his old age, however, Avati seems to be relishing a new calling as a horror writer. Recent years have seen the publication of Il Signor Diavolo and its sequel L’Archivio del Diavolo – with the former also adapted into a movie. Like its predecessors, L’Orto Americano is subtitled “Un Romanzo del Gotico Maggiore”. I was rather surprised to see reviews saying that branding this novel as a work of the “high Gothic” is misleading since it is more of a psychological thriller. I beg to differ. What I liked best about L’Orto Americano in fact is the way it uses tropes of the traditional Gothic – we have an unreliable narrator, mysterious happenings which could be supernatural in origin but could equally result from the fevered imaginings of the characters, gruesome murders and things which go bump in the night (including a Poe-like episode featuring a coffin in a run-down country house). As in his previous horror novels, Pupi Avati uses the Gothic genre to express the anxieties of the era in which the novel is set. This is an Italy which is still trying to rebuild its identity, society and economy after the deadly ravages of the war. This is symbolically conveyed, for instance, in the harrowing scene where the narrator seeks Barbara among the cadavers of other American soldiers stored in a warehouse in the foggy terrain of the Po.   

L'Orto Americano is strong on atmosphere and, make no mistake, it is a heavily Gothic one. What disappointed me is the narrative itself. Admittedly, coincidences are also a convenient trope of the genre, but the very premise of the novel (the protagonist settling in the US and coincidentally meeting Barbara’s family) is hard to believe – unless, of course, one interprets it as a meta-fictional story concocted by a mentally disturbed narrator.  Taken at face value, it is a tale with supernatural elements, rooted in a realistic post-war setting. Yet, at the end there’s a dreamlike sequence which leaves the narrative wide-open. Some might relish the ambiguity. I do as well – but only within limits – and by the novel’s final pages I felt puzzled and frustrated.

Avati is working on the movie-version of the book. It has been selected to close this year’s Venice Film Festival and I can’t wait to watch it. Perhaps some of my questions will be answered then.   

129 pages, Kindle Edition, Solferino

Published October 31, 2023