Apocalypse Wow!
by
Giorgio Quintini
The title of the
novel was clearly a take on the 1979 Francis Ford Coppola film, Apocalypse Now. Giorgio Quintini’s title
has since been used for video games.
In the mid-1980s
Giorgio Quintini was occupied in writing a second and last novel which, like
the first, would be a satire on contemporary society. But if I malnati was the bildungsroman of the young Quintini, Apocalypse Wow! was the culmination of the life in Italy of
Giorgio Quintini-Paleologo. The hero of the first novel, Andrea, is a lightly
veiled portrait of the author, and all the other characters in that roman a clef are based on friends and
acquaintances. However, a quarter of a century later, none of the characters in
Apocalypse Wow! can be traced to just
one source, except for some minor walk on parts put there for reasons of satire
and in jokes with the few friends who might be the readers of the novel. Most
of the main characters have various traits which represent different sides of
the author’s own personality.
Giorgio Quintini in Taormina in Sicily in the mid 1980s, on holiday with some friends whose company probably influenced some of the early atmosphere of the novel and who certainly listened to Giorgio's later readings from his manuscript. The light which got into the film when the camera was being unloaded might be the lights in the sky which announce the Apocalypse.
Although the
characters of the novel move between Paris, London, New York, the South of
France and Venice, the principal locations are Sicily (Palermo) and Rome. Its
main action takes place in the capital of Italy, whose low-living High-Life is
amusingly laid bare. There is, however, a simple plot which serves to display a
whole menagerie of extravagant characters who seem to have expanded some of the
bit parts in Fellini’s film Roma.
The main
protagonist is the heir to a Sicilian dukedom, surrounded by a host of both
pious and venal relations from the old Sicilian aristocracy and new political classes.
If the background is Tomasi di Lampedusa, the humour is Ronald Firbank,
Philippe Julian, the William Plomer of Curious
Relations, the Angus Wilson of Such
Darling Dodos, Nancy Mitford, Evelyn Waugh and behind all of them, Marcel
Proust, whose works Giorgio Quintini loved, read and reread.
The pure fun the
author has in listing improbable noble titles has some of the silliness of
Firbank’s Cardinal Pirelli. There are
many jokes for his friends who will understand and identify some of the
situations and people involved in the fairly simple story. Anyone who believes
that Giorgio Quintini was guilty of over-exaggeration need only take a look at
some Italian internet sites regarding the nobility and so-called aristocracy to
see how many people in the country take matters of status and nomenclature
extremely seriously indeed. Giorgio only uses satirical hyperbole to poke fun
at this special weakness of a society he knew very well.
The book opens
with the preparations for a very exclusive ball to which only the highest
levels of the old aristocracy were invited, and naturally enough there is the
problem of interlopers who have to be there – a local politician who had made
his money in questionable circumstances but whose daughter was engaged to be
married to the heir to the family dukedom. Because of this engagement and
because the politician is going to be blackmailed by some of his mafia chums,
the future heir is kidnapped and sent back having been castrated.
The opening of "Apocalypse Wow!"
The idea for
this probably came from Giorgio’s long friendship with Giò Stajano, who finally
had an operation and became a woman, although, very tall and muscular as she
was, something of an improbable one. The hero of the book thus becomes the
heroine and a whole series of adventures take place whereby this and that noble
title changes because of irregular adoptions of handsome servants by bachelor
nobles, in a whirl of scandal based upon the Roman life of the gossip magazines
of the 1980s. Names change; partners change, from male to female or vice versa;
fortunes are made through vice and talent, or talented vice; sexes change;
social mobility is extreme, but all is done with style so as not to muddy the
waters of hypocritical Roman society. Comedy is rife and Giorgio Quintini is
good at a genre which has always been undervalued by Italian critics. A comic page and a half where Giorgio jokes about the use of female nicknames among male homosexuals may be found in the posting here for 23rd June 2015 on "Le Marie".
To close the
book the author projects the reader into the future, which for him in the mid
eighties was a possible two thousand and something, in which there is a general
restoration of monarchy all over the world, with an even greater amount of
institutionalised corruption than normal (Italy is the model for this). And it
ends with the election of a new Pope who takes the name of the very first one,
which is a sign that the Apocalypse, with the end of the world, has come.
Here, near the end of the book, some pretensions of the Italian aristocracy are the butt of Quintini's humour as he imagines an absurd future for the country.
Giorgio Quintini
was a lifelong opponent of the establishment to which he belonged and which he
knew and sometimes manipulated well. He often said he longed to see the day
when Russian tanks would stream along Via del Corso and Via della Conciliazione,
but he had not foreseen the fall of the Berlin wall and the embracement of the
very worst aspects of capitalism by the nations of the Eastern Bloc.
The novel took him
nearly two years to write in his spare time, as he was also running a gallery at the same time, and the final page is dated, “Roma, primavera 1987”.
I believe that the novel deserves a small but dedicated readership. The author’s original
typescript exists, as do a couple of photocopied versions. Perhaps one day we
may be able to have them transferred to a disc and made available to anyone
interested.
