The Book Beat reading group selection for March is The Singularity by Dino Buzzati. We will meet virtually online via Zoom on Wednesday, March 26 at 7:00 p.m.
The Zoom link will be sent on the afternoon of the meeting to anyone interested in attending.
The Book Beat reading group features international works in translation and more, and discussions are free and open to the public.
Please call (248) 968-1190 or email bookbeatorders@gmail.com for more information.
Books will be in stock soon and discounted 15%. An email reminder will be sent when copies are available.
In this prophetic allegory about artificial intelligence by a renowned figure of twentieth-century Italian literature, a modest university professor becomes involved in a remote and enigmatic project in the middle of the Cold War.
At the beginning of Dino Buzzati’s The Singularity, Ermanno Ismani, an unassuming university professor, is summoned by the minister of defense to accept a two-year, top-secret mission at a mysterious research center, isolated from the world among forests, plunging cliffs, and high mountains. What’s he supposed to do there? Not clear. How long will he be there? No saying.
Still, Ismani takes the mystifying job and, accompanied by his no-nonsense wife, Elisa, heads to the so-called Experimental Camp of Military Zone 36, wondering whether, in the midst of the Cold War, it’s some sort of nuclear project he’s been assigned to. But no, the colleagues the couple meets on arrival assure them, it’s nothing like that. It’s much, much more powerful.
At the center of the research complex is strange, shining, at times murmurous, white wall. Behind it, a deep gorge drops away, full of wires and radio towers and mobile sensors and a host of eccentric structures. A question begins to dawn: Could this be the shape of consciousness itself? And if so, whose?
Buzzati’s novella of 1960, a pioneering work of Italian science fiction, is published here in a brisk new translation by Anne Milano Appel. In it, Buzzati explores his favorite themes of love and longing while offering a startlingly prescient parable of artificial intelligence.
“Dino Buzzati is one of the great literary practitioners of the dark marvelous. To my mind, he constitutes one corner in the triangle of indispensable twentieth-century Italian fantasists, a status he shares with his contemporaries Italo Calvino and Tommaso Landolfi.” —Kevin Brockmeier, Electric Literature
“Dino Buzzati was an individualist…akin to Italo Calvino in his taste for the bizarre and the fairy tale.” —N.S. Thompson, Times Literary Supplement
“Rather than a text-prediction chatbot, the AI in The Singularity has a soul—or at least a ‘glass egg’ approximating a soul…. Buzzati is frequently compared to Kafka, Borges, and Calvino. Like them, his novels and stories…have a fabulous quality.” —Ben Cosman, Cleveland Review of Books
Dino Buzzati (1906–1972) came from a distinguished family that had long been resident in the northern Italian region of the Veneto. His mother was descended from a noble Venetian family; his father was a professor of international law. Buzzati studied law at the University of Milan and, at the age of twenty-two, went to work for Corriere della Sera, where he remained for the rest of his life. He served in World War II as a journalist connected to the Italian navy and on his return published the book for which he is most famous, The Stronghold (first translated in English as The Tartar Steppe). A gifted artist as well as writer, Buzzati was the author of five novels and numerous short stories, as well as a popular children’s book, The Bears’ Famous Invasion of Sicily.