Bug: A Novel

Description

Finalist for the 2022 Philip K. Dick Award With the wicked humor and imagination that made readers fall in love with his novel I Am God, Giacomo Sartori brings us a madcap story of family dysfunction, (dis)ability, intelligent robots, bees, and a family of misfit savants living outside the bounds. In the singular world of the young, deaf narrator of Bug, there are just a handful of people who try to understand him when he gets into trouble at school. His father, a data analyst for Nutella whose real job is to pinpoint terrorists, is clueless about humans in real life. His brilliant brother, called IQ in public and Robin Hood in the hackersphere, has his back but is ever busier training his robot. His grandfather, a retired anarchist-guerilla-turned-nematologist, chides him for misbehaving when he takes him hunting for worms. Meanwhile, his Buddhist beekeeper mother, ordinarily his closest confidante, has been in a coma ever since a terrible car accident. Just when the family's survival in their converted chicken coop seems most precarious, someone-or something-new enters his life: Bug. This self-declared "fast friend" seems to know all about his family and has some creative, if not strictly legal, ideas about how to help....

About the Author: The novelist, poet, and dramatist Giacomo Sartori was born in 1958 in Trento, Italy. He is an agronomist specializing in soil studies. Sartori has published seven novels, four collections of stories, poetry, and texts for the stage, and he is an editor of the literary collective Nazione Indiana. He lives between Paris and Trento. About the Translator: Frederika Randall grew up in Pittsburgh and has lived in Italy for more than 30 years. A journalist and translator from Italian, she has written cultural reportage for numerous US and Italian publications. She translated the epic novel of the Risorgimento, Ippolito Nievo's Confessions of An Italian,fiction by Guido Morselli, Luigi Meneghello, Ottavio Cappellani, Helena Janeczek, Igiaba Scego and Davide Orecchio, and three volumes of nonfiction by historian Sergio Luzzatto. Awards include a Pen-Heim grant, and with Luzzatto, the Cundill Prize for Historical Literature. More at frederikarandall.wordpress.com.

Praise for Bug: "Italian novelist Giacomo Sartori's Bug is interested in the way personhood merges with technology. The nameless narrator here is a deaf, hyperactive 10-year-old.... BUG is an AI and he solidifies the bond with the narrator by hacking into the web to play dirty tricks on their enemies. Mr. Sartori portrays the pair as unlikely kindred spirits, restlessly brilliant social outcasts who feel trapped within their bodies (or hardware, as it were). The novel's language is brainy and technical yet inflected by childhood naivete, a high-wire act that translator Frederika Randall superbly conveys.... Though its backdrop is dystopian, the novel is always on the side of erring humanity. Between BUG and the young narrator, only one has a conscience and an ability to love." -Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal "Full of colorful characters, tender relationships, and satirical high jinks, it chronicles the struggles and small victories of a family, led by a bee-keeping Buddhist matriarch, that lives in a chicken coop. The novel's finest achievement may be the voice (which Randall pitches beautifully in English) and perspective of its unnamed ten-year-old narrator.... The bitter undertow of Sartori's sweet fable, then, is the real global crisis of the natural world, which is also our crisis." -Geoffrey Brock, New York Review of Books "One of the great works written thus far about the Anthropocene-and I say 'thus far' because, frankly, I can't wait to see what Sartori will do next." -Jim Hicks, The Massachusetts Review "A witty tale of family resilience and a dangerous, homemade AI bot.... the characters' antics escalate in inventive and unexpected ways. This is worth a spin." -Publishers Weekly "So many things happen simultaneously in Bug that, with any other writer, this kind of chaos would veer completely out of control (like a rapidly-developing AI consciousness, perhaps?). Sartori, though, juggles it all with calm, confident hands to the very end, producing what is now one of my favorite books of all time, whether speculative or not." -Rachel Cordasco, Speculative Fiction in Translation "Sartori's Bug is a study in quirkiness, but it is founded upon a serious and complex substratum.... [Underneath] all of the entertaining commotion is an investigation into the relationship of words, signs, feelings, and thoughts, as well as a cautionary tale of artificial intelligence running amok.... Bug is a worthwhile adventure cast in the melded whimsy and substance characteristic of Sartori's work." -R. P. Finch, PopMatters "The prose is lively, intense, and full of perceptive similes. The boy's voice is unique and memorable as he records his daily adventures at school and at home.... Whether real or imagined or both, the boy's adventures show him to be resilient, vulnerable, caring, and inquisitive-but above all else, he is a neglected child who wants his mother back." -Eileen Gonzalez, Foreword Reviews "With wry attention to the gorgeous frailty of human behavior and a wicked sense of humor, Sartori brings us a family that is utterly unremarkable and unforgettable. Living in a chicken coop as his family goes through emotional and financial turmoil, the narrator, a ten-year-old boy, pulls the reader into his head. When language fails him ('...words lend themselves without restraint to confecting colossal lies, you might even say they enjoy it.'), he turns to an unpredictable online friend. With the same messy heartbeat he gave us in I Am God, Sartori's newest novel is pure delight." -Shawn, Mara, and Marisa, Chapter One Book Store (Hamilton, MT)