The Earth Is Falling by Carmen Pellegrino

The Earth is Falling by Carmen Pellegrino, published in English translation (trans. Shaun Whiteside) by Prototype in 2024, originally published in Italian as Cada la Terra in 2015

After a couple of extra long posts, let’s have a nice, shorter, more concise one. Which is easier to do as this is a novel about loss, place, a sense of home, the passage of time and (perhaps) environmental destruction as a result of climate change, none of which are topics I personally have much to say about*…

First off, I think it would be remiss to avoid praising the translation: regardless of how accurate a reflection of Carmen Pellegrino’s prose it is, Shaun Whiteside has produced a text that is incredibly lyrical, poetic, and invested with meaning and rigour. One presumes that potency is there in the original, so obviously full kudos to Pellegrino, but…

As we all know, sometimes even an acclaimed literary novel in translation can have prose that feels unrefined, uncrafted, like there is an artlessness to the text, and sometimes this is (imo falsely) claimed to be an attempt to render a seamless vision of the original text, but often it just feels like the publisher hired someone suited to translating copy to translate literature…

That hasn’t happened here: the prose is crisp and clear, yes, but it is also poetic, smooth, and feels coherent and consistent with the narrative and characters depicted in the text.

The translation feels intentional, artful, thought-through and good. Presumably Pellegrino’s original prose is just as satisfying, if not more so – either way, going forward I’ll have high expectations of any other texts I see translated into English by Whiteside.

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What’s the novel about? What’s it like?

Ghosts, haunting, life and death, clarity and madness, memory and regret, warmth and ideas of home, ambiguity around histories and pasts and narratives, ambiguities around presents and futures, too…

The novel is set in an abandoned village that is being slowly destroyed and buried by landslides. As Pellegrino writes in an Afterword, she originally intended to base the novel on a real place, but during drafting moved away from that intention in order to permit herself more freedom of imagination and meaning – rather than a fictionalised history of a real town, she felt it offered more to a novelist to allow the people, the buildings, the exact location and the exact chronology of destruction and landslides to be freed from the rigidity of a “truth”. I think that decision pays off.

Is what we see here madness? Is it mourning? Is the meal for ghosts produced by the protagonist (the last person living in the abandoned and unsafe settlement) a real meal? Is the one living guest she believes she has a real living guest or another ghost, too? Are the stories she tells us about the ghosts that visit her the true lives of the former residents or narratives she has constructed just by seeing these people in the streets, in her dreams, in her haunted home?

It’s a mysterious, ambiguous, serious, text, and though I don’t have much to comment on about it, that isn’t because it isn’t powerful, evocative and compelling, it is just that I’ve never felt tied or emotionally connected to a place, really, and I’m quite self centred (or not, I dunno) and thus can’t extrapolate at length about the feelings the book made me wrestle with.

It’s good, it’s great, it’s solid. Would read more by the author, will read more by the publisher.

Thank you, bye.

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* (I’ve never really had a sense of any place feeling like home, tbh, having never really lived anywhere (save my extended trip to Barcelona in 2018) that I didn’t explicitly hope to leave, indefinitely… So, I suppose I could digress on this topic, but after having done similar things in those posts about family and the death of a partner (see last two non-video posts), but I’m not going to as I really want to finish off all the draft posts in here and/or get some things scheduled on the blog so I can feel like I’ve caught up with myself (which was something I was hoping I’d feel like by the end of one month unemployed/freelance but it really doesn’t feel like that at all, how that November is over… All I’ve been doing – rather than catching up with myself around caring for the baby – is worrying about dog exports, worrying about finding small amounts of work, feeling increasing anxiety (possibly as a result of too-strong North American coffee?) and driving driving driving (which is not something that relaxes me) and therefore not catching up on social emails/messages, not submitting poems, not working on short films, not performing, not doing anything, really, other than using voice to text (using my fingers today as the weather is warmer) to transcribe way-too-long drafts of blog posts that I struggle to find the time to edit into something publishable… Maybe I should totally pivot to video? No, I think that’s a regressive idea. I missed the window to find a video audience, and that’s fine. The 5,000 unique views a month can’t all be bots or one-offs!!!!)