Reviewed by Cesare Sinatti
Maximalist Fatigue
Antonio Moresco’s trilogy titled Games of Eternity is a kind of UFO (unidentified fictional object) occasionally sighted within the English publishing world. Terminally online readers in search of a thrill might have stumbled upon The Untranslated blog-post discussing the trilogy as “the next big thing” and comparing it to several masterpieces in world literature; and the bravest might have even attempted reading Distant Light or Clandestinity, the only available works of Moresco in English until this year – both good entry points into his oeuvre. Now, as the Games of Eternity trilogy finally makes it debut in the anglophone world with its first volume fittingly titled The Beginnings (Gli esordi), readers might be left wondering: is this yet another maximalist doorstepper that will try to squeeze the whole universe into a few thousand pages?
Lately, there seems to be a sense of fatigue surrounding these thick, concept-heavy books, dense with references and generous in the use of stylistic and structural devices – to the point that, as with most dying underground phenomena bubbling up into the mainstream, a trend seems to have crystallized around them: “brodernism”. Tangential to the manosphere in its performative aims, but “safer” in its being centered around literature instead of weightlifting and financial success, “brodernism” could be defined as the tendency to attach one’s male consumer identity to big fiction books of the maximalist kind. With a swooping generalization, authors such as Cartarescu and Krasznahorkai, some Pynchon, some Bolaño, some Foster Wallace could all be included in the brodernist canon – not because of their lack of literary merit, but because of the almost excessive amount thereof, and the (more or less) justified hyperbolic tone of the discourse surrounding them.
There might be, however, at least some truth at the bottom of this generalization: when handling some of these books, it is often difficult to shake the feeling of reading “a brilliantly executed forgery by an exceptionally nasty forger” (my translation), as Italian publisher Roberto Bazlen defined William Gaddis’ The Recognitions – a quintessential brodernist text. More often than not, these works are post-modern not in their attempt to move beyond modernism, but in being derivative of modernist aesthetic and ideas as to what a work of literature, and a work of art in general, could or should be. It is a Beckettian tragedy, in a sense: in the attempt of surpassing the master (be it Joyce, Proust or any other modernist genius), many of these authors end up being defined by their relationship to them.
What about Antonio Moresco, then? What was he doing in the Italian underground, while all these Big Beautiful (Boomer) Books were breaking boundaries and blowing minds? He was bringing to completion Beckett’s own recommendation to “fail better.” He was answering directly to Beckett’s final “you must go on, I can’t go on, I’ll go on” in The Unnamable, with his own: “to go on, one must break through by force, one must betray the brothers and the masters” (Lettere a nessuno, 62, my translation). He was beginning – again and again and again.
Notes from the Underground
Born in 1948 in Mantova, Antonio Moresco has been a Catholic seminarian, a militant in Italy’s extra-parliamentary left during the Years of Lead and, finally, a writer. Now considered by many Italian readers (but, it must be said, only by a handful of Italian critics, which significantly hindered his recognition at home and abroad) to be one of the most important living Italian writers, he had a troubled publishing history: The Beginnings took more than ten years to find a publisher, before coming out for the first time in 1998.
This long silence was due to several reasons: the book’s experimental nature; the close-mindedness of Italian publishers; and Moresco’s outsider status as someone who does not belong to any of the known cultural clans within the country, and is unwilling to be assimilated by any. His long quest for the publication of The Beginnings resulted in the quintessential “unpublished author” book, the Lettere a nessuno (Letters to Nobody, still untranslated), which for the most part contains a collection of unsent letters addressed to people within the Italian cultural world – as well as a series of scattered reflections on the making of The Beginnings. In the Letters, he writes: “Incredible, grotesque things are happening in our country, in the world. Yet, in this universal chit-chat, the dominating perspective is one that cannot see beyond the small, devastating, autistic ‘history’ of our species. A representation of what exists through political, religious and social categories, an infinitely small and partial outlook on a world born alongside the self-referential illusion of modernity and, before it, with ‘History’ and ‘Politics’ as separate human categories.” (409, my translation)
In this regard, The Beginnings may, in its ambition, share some of the philosophical naivety found in some of the aforementioned “brodernists” when returning to, or commenting on, modernist existential themes, but it differentiates itself from them radically in having found its own way to “betray the masters” – in particular Beckett’s anti-referential trilogy, and Kafka’s gnostic novels, to name some. Whereas some of Moresco’s contemporaries – Cartarescu in particular, to whom he has been compared on The Untranslated and with whom he recently released a double interview in Italian published as the short book Dentro lo stesso sogno (Into the Same Dream, untranslated) – seems to have been more deeply concerned with the concepts and existential questions directly derived from modernist authors, Moresco seems instead to have internalized, from Beckett and Kafka in particular, a kind of method, through which he maintains the primacy of narrative movement over explanatory and theoretical uses of language.
The Beginnings achieves, in this regard, something of considerable difficulty, and something deeply liberating, in times in which explanatory writing, philosophical and existential musings risk to be re-branded as escapism for adults: he manages to build a deeply philosophical book through the sheer energy of literary presentation.
A Triple Bildungsroman
The Beginnings is structured in three parts, increasingly contracted but growing in dynamism. As stated in Francesco Pacifico’s preface to the book, it could be defined as the story of Moresco’s triple “Bildung” and arrival to writing through his religious and political experiences.
The first part, titled “The Silent Scene,” begins with the main character polishing his shoes before beginning his day in a Catholic seminar, “prolonging the operation infinitely so as to capture the instant at which the polish expanded to the point of disappearing, lost its consistency, and subsisted only as bright light bereft of body or color.” (21) “I would play this and other games of eternity,” (21) says the unnamed protagonist, defining perceptual tests of the kind a child would play, such as “mentally cutting the flame of a candle with a penknife” (72) or “making out a small dot that would move almost invisibly, far above the hills” (253) behind a window – as if he were trying to fine-tune his own senses.
What is most strange, however, is how this fine-tuning seems to extend to all aspects of his life in the seminary: everyday objects are often described as if seen for the first time, in almost alien ways, and characters are introduced only through nicknames (the Cat, the Peach, the Nerve, Lenìn, etc.), so that all the geography of human and familial relationships that would situate them in genealogies and hierarchies is now submerged, calling the reader to decipher them through gestures and events alone – here, the influence of Beckett and Kafka as possible starting points for his project is truly felt.
The protagonist seems himself at an impasse, when trying to understand the world: unwilling to speak until the end of the first part, in the second, “The Historical Scene,” we find that he has now left the seminar and joined a militant leftwing group, and is travelling in a small car through a mountainous region with his comrades. “Couldn’t we go a bit faster?” (259) asks an unnamed character in the opening sentence of this segment, uttering a question the reader themselves might have begun to ask, at that point. Here, one immediately notices that the very visual texture of the page has now changed: long descriptive paragraphs have now transformed, almost entirely, into broken lines of dialogue.
This isn’t realistic dialogue, however, nor is it meant to be: it’s a dialogue made of exclamation points, question marks and frequent ellipses, almost reminiscent of comic books. Characters are now constantly talking, often in confused ways, anticipating each other’s sentences, struggling to hear each other properly; and they are constantly moving, in contrast to the static and silent atmosphere of the first part. This is, in Moresco’s experience and words, the political activism of the Years of Lead in Italy, made of confused instructions, actions and words that do not translate into real world-change and leave, much like in the first part, the impression that something still remains fundamentally unexpressed.
Finally, the third part, “The Party Scene,” begins with an inner monologue describing the main character approaching the city of Milan, where he would try to become a writer. Alternating between attempts to reach a comically elusive publisher and wanderings through the city, the unnamed protagonist meets once again several characters – some real and mentioned in the previous parts; some entirely fictional, such as Dostoevsky’s Smerdyakov and Melville’s Bartleby; some dead, such as poets Emily Dickinson and Giacomo Leopardi.
As literary characters and dead authors begin to burst more and more often into the narration, Moresco’s writing seems to approach a synthesis between the contemplative tone of the first part and the dialogical tone of the second. The main character ceases to be simply an observer of his surroundings, and instead begins interrogating them: his inner voice opens into an inner dialogue with itself; and little stories, atomically contained in his hypotheses about the world around him, begin to bubble in his mind:
I’d make out the silhouette of some cat curled up asleep on the roof of a parked car. “They don’t wake up even if you pass right by them, sleeping so deeply that they don’t even stir when the car starts, you can still hear them purring as the car speeds down the deserted streets and its driver begins to throw his head back, to yawn. . .” (566)
A Beginner’s Mindset
As one may have noticed at this point, The Beginnings includes a vast assortment of characters, places and situations that are almost impossible to account for in their entirety and that, precisely for this reason, cannot be interpreted through usual categories. Where, for instance, nicknamed characters would invite an allegorical reading, the sheer amount of nicknames makes it impossible to build any intelligible allegorical map of their significance between the three parts of the book. The same is true for repeated imagery, such as the numerous descriptions of light and its effects; or repeated words (the discussion on the use of the term “sgranato/shucked” in the translator’s afterword offers a good example of this); as well as for entire repeated situations, such as seminar days, political events, and conversations with the publisher. What should the reader focus on, then? What is Moresco inviting us to do, with this vast and varied book?
The way change is perceived between the parts – namely, from description to dialogue, and from dialogue to inner monologue – is our main clue: this change is, first and foremost, a change in narrative movement, rather than being merely a change of characters and situations. The “pacing” itself, to use a reductive term, seems to ever accelerate towards an endpoint that we cannot yet see; and so do descriptions, dialogues, situations and characters.
In The Beginnings, we are witnessing the ignition of a powerful story-engine, that will be set in full motion throughout the following volumes of the trilogy, Songs of Chaos and The Uncreated: here, we are invited to take a “starting position” by assuming the mindset of someone who is a beginner in the literal sense: at life, at thinking, at perceiving the world. This mindset, as the book implies without ever making it explicit, is that of one who interrogates movement and change as the substrata of subjects, objects and their relations, since none of these are yet given, and since reality is not at all as stable or as readable as we often believe. Already in Lettere a nessuno, Moresco advised himself and his readers against thinking about reality as “a subject matter codified once and for all and there were not instead infinite ways to intercept it and flush it out and open it and disembowel it” (412, my translation). How would life look like, if seen for the very first time? How would we navigate it, and how would we interrogate it, if we had yet to invent a language for it?
To Begin and to Debut
By reading this first part of the Games of Eternity, it appears as if Moresco had anticipated our contemporary fatigue with maximalist, all-encompassing and all-explaining books, and set his own answer to it, which is to not try to understand and conceptualize everything, but to interrogate it nonetheless: to move through it with a questioning mind and to observe the very movement of this questioning. One will not find Cartarescu’s gnosticism in this book, nor Krasznahorkai’s nihilism, nor Pynchon’s conspiracism, nor any other “-ism”: there is no signpost ideology or philosophy to assign to this novel; and, as a consequence, no forgery of masters.
The central theme of The Beginnings, and the sincere attempt of its author and its protagonist, is that of trying to begin to think again – and to repeat this attempt every time our categories fail us. In doing so, the book defines its own psychological attitude towards the world, which is not that of inner emotional and moral conflict, but of questioning and interrogation: the psychology of the philosopher and the child, not that of the adult trying to position themselves in a world where all relationships are given and all hierarchies established. It is a beginner psychology: the zero point from which all positioning in the world can begin, and from which the world can be thought again, from the start.
In Italian “esordio” does not only mean “beginning,” but also “debut”. An artist’s or an author’s first work is called an “esordio”, and the debuting author is an “esordiente.” The Beginnings (Gli esordi) is a debut marked by opposition already in it’s first two words, “Io, invece…” (“I, on the other hand…”); a genuine attempt not to be defined by existing categories, propelled by an internal drive to invent for itself its own modes of expression. “‘We thought it was a given that words had to stay inside of themselves, in their proper places!” (583) shouts the publisher towards the end of the book – “ do they?” is the reply of The Beginnings as a whole. There is no specific way to move through things, seems to suggest Moresco, and understanding, much like life, should be allowed to be rocambolesque and daring: meditative and silent, talkative and disorganized, lyrical and fun.
Moresco, Antonio. The Beginnings. Translated by Max Lawton. Deep Vellum, 2026.
Cesare Sinatti holds a PhD in Ancient Philosophy from the University of Durham. He is the author of the novels La Splendente (Feltrinelli, 2018) and Eco (Italo Svevo Edizioni, 2025). His articles and short stories have appeared in newspapers and online magazines.