Title: A Devil Comes to Town (Goodreads)
Author: Paolo Maurensig
Translator: Anne Milano Appel
Published: World Editions, May 19, 2019
Pages: 120
Genres: Contemporary
My Copy: ARC
Buy: Amazon, Book Depository, Kindle, Wordery (or visit your local Indie bookstore)
In the small village of Dichtersruhe, situated by the Swiss mountains, there is a strong sense of literary kinship. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once visited the village. It feels like everyone wants to be a writer; everyone has a manuscript sitting in a drawer somewhere. One night a mysterious person comes to town, a hotshot working in publishing. In a town full of narcissistic writers, the devil has come to exploit their unsatisfied authorial desires.
Paolo Maurensig has delivered a dark comical Faustian tale in A Devil Comes to Town. What drew me to this novel was the premise and I went in with such a high expectation, I worried that it could not live up to what I expected. This novel screams ‘my type of book’, with its dark humour, literary references and a little theology. Thanks to the work of Anne Milano Appel translating this Italian novel, I was able to experience A Devil Comes to Town.
“Literature is the greatest of the arts,” the priest continued, “but it is also a dangerous endeavor.”
“In what sense, dangerous?”
“Each time we pick up a pen we are preparing to perform a ritual for which two candles should always be lit: one white and one black. Unlike painting and sculpture, which remain anchored to a material subject, and to music, which in contrast transcends matter altogether, literature can dominate both spheres: the concrete and the abstract, the terrestrial and the otherworldly. Moreover, it propagates and multiplies with infinite variations in readers’ minds. Without knowing it, the writer can become a formidable egregore.”
While the premise of the novel is what drew me in, what really stuck to me was the imagery. Outside the village of Dichtersruhe, foxes infected with rabies run rampant on the farmlands. The fog set in and created a dark creepy atmosphere. While this worked really well, it was a little on the nose when reading about foxes in the henhouses and then finding out the devil’s name was Bernard Fox. I never like when a novel explains its metaphors and thankfully it only did this in passing. However, once was all that was needed, it was such an obvious metaphor, that did not need any explanation.
While there is a lot of references to Goethe in the novel, it is obviously inspired by Faust as well. I felt like there was a nod to The Master and Margarita within the pages as well. Most notably was the use of a manuscript inside the novel. This is a great framing device for the plot but in my mind, it was more of a way to include Bulgakov as a literary influence.
A Devil Comes to Town was a joy to read, and it seemed to come at the right time. I had been reading the Man Booker International longlist and was looking forward to picking my own reading. While there was some imagery and literary references to enjoy, it felt like a palette cleanser in comparisons to some of the heavier books I had just read. Not that there is anything wrong with that, the dark humour was exactly what I needed at this point of time, and that made A Devil Comes to Town worth reading.
Title: Sphinx (