WRITER - "APOCALYPSE WOW!"

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.