Dark Man

Matt Hartman is a freelance editor and cataloguer, running Hartman Cataloguing, Editing and Indexing Services.

Dark Man (L’uomo nero in the original Italian) spends most of its 236
pages beating up on religious dogma and sexual fixation.

Pace’s central figure, a mysterious stranger named Schultze, works
his way into the lives of the twin children of the seamstress Meyer,
kidnaps them, then spirits them away to the sin-ridden city of Truender.
Along the way he confronts the Church, in the person of Brother Erasmus
(as well as some strange nuns and assorted others), whose purpose
appears to be as much plot obfuscation as narrative clarity.

And oh, is there obfuscation in this novel! Trying to get a handle on
the comings and goings of the twins—Augustin the boy, Anne-Lise the
girl—and on Schultze himself is problematic at best, impossible at
worst. Pace’s surrealism is made even more opaque by what appears to
be Verdicchio’s literal translation of the text. What is one to make
of this impenetrable prose: “Dawn drew in cold across the windows of
the Meyer house. Immobile and sleepless Schultze watched it come closer.
That grayish and confused clearing grew parallel to widening wound and
anguish.” The original Italian might have contained such clumsy
syntax; in any case, Verdicchio’s translation magnifies its stumbling
rhythms.

Pace’s anti-Papist sentiments are summed up in the person of Erasmus,
who is eager to use the seamstress’s talents for his own ends,
regardless of what transpires. And throughout the novel there is a
sexual tension bordering, at times, on parody, as when Augustin is raped
by an ape at the zoo.

Dark Man is fascinating, though in a confusing and fantastical way.