Review: Distant Light, BY Antonio Moresco, translated by Richard Dixon (Archipelago Books).

By Frederika Randall

Distant Light is a brief, austere novel, or better, novella, by an Italian writer best known for a monumental trilogy written over 20 years and counting more than 3,000 pages, L’increato (The Uncreated, meaning roughly “the divine”).  Meanwhile this small, vivid tale, the author writes in his preface to the Italian edition, began as an episode in volume three of the trilogy, but then took on a life of its own: a “little moon that broke away from the yet-to-coalesce mass of my new novel”. “Had I dropped dead the day after writing it, this would have been my last will and testament,” he says. Not that it’s his most meaningful or significant work, he thinks, but because it is “so keenly private and secret.”

Keep reading Frederika Randall's review of Distant Light.

Born in Pittsburgh, Frederika Randall has lived in Italy for 30 years. Translations include fiction by Luigi Meneghello, Helena Janeczek, Ottavio Cappellani and Igiaba Scego; Ippolito Nievo’s Confessions of an Italian, and three books by historian Sergio Luzzatto. Guido Morselli’s The Communist comes out in 2017 from New York Review Books.