The Upside Down of an Italian Summer: Human-Nonhuman Enmeshment and Defamiliarization in Michele Mari’s Verderame

This chapter explores the defamiliarizing devices employed in Michele Mari’s 2007 novel Verderame through a New Formalist and ecocritical lens, investigating the relationship between literary and sociopolitical forms (Levine, Forms. Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2015) while taking into consideration the eco-narratological outcomes of the posthuman turn (Caracciolo, Narrating the Mesh. Form and Story in the Anthropocene. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2021). Set over the course of a summer in the late 1960s, Verderame tells the coming-of-age story of Michelino and his friendship with the old handyman Felice, who has long worked in the summer house of the boy’s grandparents. Mari’s novel highlights how Caracciolo’s categories of interdependency and multiscalarity can be woven together with Shklovsky’s defamiliarization while, at the same time, originally combining the weird, the eerie, and the unheimlich (Fisher, The Weird and the Eerie. London: Repeater Books, 2016). Despite not being overtly political or ecological, Verderame’s stylistic and plot strategies challenge the illusion of human mastery over nature by defamiliarizing common misconceptions of hierarchy and ownership between human and nonhuman entities. The story unveils a mesh-like reality relentlessly muttering beneath the surface of Michelino’s family’s property, haunting the boy with wonder and terror. In this continuum of humans, animals, and things, defamiliarization paves the way for ecological awareness, and ignites the recognition of a metaphysical parity amongst human and nonhuman entities and matter.