The book of hidden things

Three books in one year by a single author has to be a record for me; I am usually a lot slower at getting through an author’s publications. But Francesco Dimitri’s writing style is just so captivating, and his philosophical outlook on life so endearing; I could not help but move on to his English debut. This book definitely felt like it could have used a bit more touching up, with more of that slightly awkward feeling of reading a debut work. Granted, Dimitri has written in Italian previously, and it is no easy feat to master the craft of writing in a second language, but I still want to note that this is how it felt as a reader.

The Book of Hidden Things is set in southern Italy, Puglia, a region that Dimitri is intimately familiar with. Nobody writes southern Italy like him—he gets all the details that make you feel as if you are exactly there and interacting with people who truly live there. The love he has for the sense of the place is not lost on the reader. We follow a group of friends who are all tied together by an enigmatic friend, Art, who disappears at the outset of the story. What starts off as a standard mystery novel becomes something more, as elements of crime thrillers, magical realism, and light fantasy weave their way into the narrative.

This was a book that gripped me from beginning to end, as was the case for Dimitri’s other book, Never the Wind. Dimitri tells the story at a breathtaking pace, while also being mindful of slowing down individual scenes so that the story feels like it is actually lived in. I will admit that some elements of the plot took me by surprise, and not necessarily in a positive manner; yet my overall enjoyment of the story was not too affected by this. In classic Dimitri style, a lot of the plot revolves around things that are just at the realm of believable, at the edge of our material world; this is a liminal space, where things may or may not happen. The story especially shines in these spaces as it cultivates a sense of wonder.

However, the plot does have some loose ends that never quite make the story feel complete. The blurb makes a great emphasis on the ‘arcane manuscript’ that the friends discover relating to Art’s disappearance, and yet it is not a huge feature in the novel. I was expecting it to play a much larger role than it eventually did. Some other minor plot points also aren’t tied up so neatly by the end, leaving me wondering what the point of including them was—especially because, in one instance, I was only reminded by a character wondering out loud what became of it.

Since the novel revolves around four friends, the role of the characters is heightened—they are our narrators, with the book using three friends as perspectives to reveal the story to the reader. A few chapters in, I found myself pleasantly surprised by the fact that my growing distaste for a certain character’s perspective evolved into discomfort and hatred—and the gradual realization that this must have been a deliberate choice on the author’s part. It takes skill to lull the reader with a false sense of security, making you feel that you could sympathize with a character, only for said character to be revealed as someone morally dubious. The friends each invoke a different archetype, whether that is the selfish, aimless man who is down on his luck or the deeply loyal and spiritual friend who will always stand by his friends. A great strength of this cast is that each is deeply flawed, for different reasons; but these flaws enrich their role in the narrative and contextualize their actions.

Art himself, the enigma and character whose disappearance serves as the central force of the novel, is a murky character. We do not get his perspective, and his presence in the novel is as liminal as some of the more magical elements. His perspective is given largely through flashbacks experienced by the other characters, his best friends. These are extremely clever bits of storytelling where the characters have a chance to reflect on their rose-tinted childhood memories and question how well they really knew Art and how deep their friendship extends. This adult-looking-back-on-childhood motif was also used by Dimitri in Never the Wind, where I found it had a great effect; here, it is less strong, but it does enhance the framing of the story.

The supporting characters can be a bit one-dimensional; I would that Dimitri had either limited the amount of supporting characters or otherwise further developed the characterization of the ones involved in the main plot beyond these sort of cliched stereotypes. Of course, the novel tends to focus on its protagonists, but the supporting roles in this story are still rather important to the outcome and deserve to have been interwoven with the narrative more neatly.

Like his other works, the novel concerns themes of liminality and the supernatural; the unknowable forces of nature; the boundary between the sacred and the profane; transitions from childhood to adulthood; and the thin line between reality and unreality. All of these things, and their related counterparts, are big parts of the magical realism of this book. It isn’t fantasy in the sense of magic playing a huge role in the narrative; if you are expecting that, this is not going to work for you. Rather, the magic tinges instances of ordinary reality, our everyday experiences and relations, with a hint of the extraordinary. Much like one can find wonder in the mundane, the magic in this story serves to enhance the realities of human nature—both good and bad.

For example, nature and the countryside might be considered characters in their own right in this novel. The winds have names and temperaments; the sea and natural phenomena are characterized and encountered—and eventually interacted with, in a way. Not only do these natural elements play major roles in the story, but they serve as a juxtaposition, e.g. between urban and rural, artificial and natural, and the knowable and unknowable. I am reminded of how meteorologists can track weather patterns but only to a limited extent; the further out the prediction, the less its validity. Here, the forces of nature are felt and occasionally seen, but one cannot quite grasp them entirely.

What is real or not? This novel plays with that notion quite a bit. Since I’m a seasoned Dimitri reader at this point (heh, if three books can count for that), I felt more certain on how to interpret the ambivalence that the author presents in the novel. Yet, even with that extensive background into Dimitri’s way of thinking, I still was somewhat unsure about the (un)reality of various events throughout the novel. Though I am fairly confident in how I knew that ending was coming.

There are, unfortunately, some weaknesses to the novel. Many other reviews have remarked on the gravest of these, chief of the complaints being that the book is misogynistic. I understand why, as throughout the novel, there are some gratuitous scenes and some unpleasant characterizations of women that did not make sense with what we know about them. Moreover, as others have pointed out, there aren’t any female characters in the novel who stand on their own two feet—except one, who is a side character; the rest are treating as objects of sexual gratification beyond anything else. Some of the characters act in ways that are rather childish, acting on their hormonal impulses when they are meant to be in their mid-30s in the present timeline. It was off-putting. At first, I was willing to give Dimitri some benefit of the doubt—perhaps it is a certain character’s perspective he wishes to convey in writing in this way, and we are intended to despise the way he thinks. However… the ending revealed that this is not entirely the case, and it is not strictly limited to the one character.

The ending, that reveal of the final twist, was… strange, and not in a pleasing way. It is disturbing, in the same sense which I experienced at some of the more horrifying parts of Never the Wind; but here, it is perhaps more insidious, because it concerns human nature in the context of friendship/relationships. As a reader, I understood that the protagonists were flawed, but I did not truly grasp the extent to which they were depraved, in various ways; even the one character who seemed fairly blameless seems to have his own demons, though not quite as extreme as the rest. Is the novel trying to make a point about this hamartia that permeates the primary characters? Or is this a sign of Dimitri honing his writing craft and relying on sleazy tropes more frequently seen in pulpy crime fiction?

I hope, somewhat selfishly, that it is the former, because I am a fan. But I am not willing to discredit the notion that it may very well be the latter. In either case, I think this criticism of the work is merited, but one which is rectified in Never the Wind. We do still have some gratuitous hints in the latter, but it is much more toned down; at this point, it seems like this is just part of Dimitri’s own worldview as it concerns women and the sexual. If so, it is unfortunate and not one that I agree with.

Despite the drawbacks, I flew through this book and was loath to leave its mystical atmosphere; reading Dimitri makes me feel like I am in Italy, and his descriptions are evocative without drowning the reader in too much detail. The landscape was not quite as central in this one as in Never the Wind; here, the characters and their flaws and secrets are front and center. This book is a mystery, but a labyrinthine one, where you may not necessarily end up in the center. Dimitri still seems to be getting his footing as a writer in this novel, but the core elements and themes that are important to him still manage to shine through. This is certainly not a novel that will work for everyone, and perhaps not most people; but it still managed to enthrall me in the mystery and wonder and complexity that I have come to expect of Francesco Dimitri.

Favorite quotes:
※ ‘We think we are in control of our lives, but we aren’t. Most of the time we don’t know what we are doing and, sheeplike, we follow something, call it fate, or the subconscious mind, or the whims of a dumb moped.’
※ ‘It might all be a coincidence, but Art taught me not to believe in coincidences. What we call a coincidence, he would say, is a system we don’t understand yet.’
※ ‘Mauro looks at the olive grove, then at me. “Don’t you hate it sometimes? Being a grown-up. Get a job, get a better one, pay taxes, pay more taxes, same old, same old. We are only alive at weekends; the rest of the time, we’re hamsters in a wheel And we can never quit spinning, ’cause there’s always another bill, another mortgage, another, what the hell, another brat to keep the wheel turning.”
“It is what it is. Once upon a time you had to go get mammoths, now you go get credit cards. On the plus side, we don’t have to risk our neck every day.”
“Yeah but at least with hunting you knew what you got.”’
※ ‘This place triggers bad memories, but that’s all they are memories, things in the past, holding no power anymore. It’s the present that can jump up and bite your ass.’
※ ‘In the grown-up world, brawn is futile. So is brain, ultimately. The one and only thing you need, the ultimate strength and source of power in this country, is an understanding of how to make bureaucracy work for you. No matter how much I find this depressing, I have been shown over and over again that it is exactly the case.’
※ ‘This deeply religious part of the world, harsh and scorched by the sun, belongs to the saints. They are junctions between the profane and the sacred, the seen and the unseen. The Hidden Things, if you will, and us. The saints and their places of worship mark the boundary between two different lands – exactly like drystone walls.’
※ ‘The junctures between the Hidden Things and us brim with enlightening stories, and enlightening stories are rarely happy. Suffering, more than any other state of mind, allows us to glimpse beyond the obvious, the everyday, the expected.’
※ ‘Wherever there is a boundary, wherever it is said that you are not allowed to walk any further, any intelligent person will be moved to do just that. Hic sunt leones? Here are the lions? Let me see them.’
※ ‘When you are young, you are immense—then you shrink. Everything is possible at five, but what is left for you at forty? With every choice you make you renounce all the choices you could have made instead, and so you become smaller and smaller, each choice consuming you a little, burning your possibilities, until nothing is left of you. Death is a progressive shrinking that brings you from vastness to nothingness.’