I don’t consider Fernando Sdrigotti a friend. I’ve known him for a a few years, sure. Mostly via Twitter and several emails. He’s edited my writing. I think calling him a friend is perhaps too optimistic. Unnecessarily twee.
I find myself covering the covers of his books when I read them in public. A nonstop attempt to hide the filthy urinals on both the front and back covers of his Dysfunctional Males or the word “shit” in red printed on his most recent cover. A friend wouldn’t require such acrobatics to prevent offending my puritan compatriots. I find myself hiding his offensive covers even when I’m in the comfort of my own home. I don’t think I’d try so hard to distance myself from the work of a friend.
La Casita Grande published Dysfunctional Males in 2017. It’s a collection of five short stories and Sdrigotti’s first book in English.
The irony of the title is that the males he writes about function perfectly in the shit society of contemporary London, which stands in as an empty context. The specificity of London serves as a generic site. It might as well be Paris or New York City or Tokyo—any place where people who wander find themselves.
His characters remind me of the types that populate the novels of Flaubert and Zola: exotics from faraway places who attempt to merge with the wealth and privilege of the capital. In spite of their proximity, these foreign-looking people nevertheless remain marginal, with various levels of fluency in “kebab English.” In “Elision” he describes the landscape: “The roads were jammed with cars and buses. The air thick with horns and carbon monoxide and the glossolalia of tourists loitering round Piccadilly Circus.”
And later, in “The Vanishing Onanist of E5”: “London is the perfect place to disappear. There are cracks in the pavement everywhere, gashes through which to fall. Living in London is like walking in this gigantic field full of potholes. Nobody asks any questions here. You can exist or you might not and nobody gives a shit. People are found after three years of rotting in their flats, the telly still on. Or after thirty years of being kidnapped by a Maoist sect. It happens all the time. London is a city of erasure.”
And from “Satori in Hainault”: “New North Road. Little houses on one side — they all look the same. Suburban transit cutting the landscape. Shops on the right side. Dry cleaners. Nail studio. Bakery. A tanning shop. Auto parts. After a while every single house, every single shop, becomes the same. Pet shop. China Chef. Before or after? Another dry cleaners or the same? They melt, they merge into a single über-shop, a mix of each and every one in the street: dry nail bakers auto tanning Chinese takeway offlicence.”
The short stories are filled with terrible people. They’re not child rapists or genocide apologists, but it’s probably because they haven’t stopped masturbating enough to explore these options. Or the shit London weather is keeping them in.
The characters are obsessed with sex and with their asses and with the sexual capabilities (and capacity) of their asses. Sdrigotti writes about sex like someone unacquainted with the act itself except theoretically. The masturbation scenes, on the other hand, are almost too believable.
In some ways, Sdrigotti’s tone throughout the short stories seems akin to Bret Easton Ellis’ in Less Than Zero. An ironic detachment coupled with an antagonistic relationship with the city and environment. A digging through the ways in which the characters, their neuroses, are symptoms of—or causes of—the city’s own sickness. In “Herne Hill,” he writes, “Having a body is being always already ill.” He could’ve easily replaced the word body with city.
A potent symptomatic image that repeats in the stories is of a character trying to find a place to fix his gaze. The Onanist thinks, “Boredom dictates that I must look at her tits. Every other guy without a book, a mobile phone, drinking alone in this place would look at her tits. That is every other guy except Big Guy, drinking here next to me, observing an impossible dusk in an impossible horizon…. I don’t feel like staring at her tits. I concentrate on trying to find the horizon instead, it seems so interesting to Big Guy. There’s no skill involved in staring at boobs, no art. I stare at the mirror, just below the bottle of Bailey’s. But soon enough I realise I won’t succeed, that I need to find my own staring point. That’s the whole point of staring: you’re staring into your own vanishing point, not someone else’s. Staring into his vanishing point would be like stealing a mantra. I look around.”
From “Satori in Hainault”: “The true face of stasis and boredom fills your gut — restlessness. A disease all too familiar to the human race, the main occupation of those in a state of detention. Restlessness, the fear of constant paralysis that makes you take in as much as possible, think as much as possible, change your position in bed as much as possible — the perverse fantasies recede and the eyes loiter from one place to the other, looking for something worthy of attention.”
In the nonplace of London, time also means nothing. Again, from “The Vanishing Onanist of E5”: “It’s only four o’clock and it’s already four o’clock. I have all the day ahead and I have already lost the day…. I feel myself catching up with myself and I need to move.” And from “Herne Hill”: “It takes time to learn how to wait, but once you can there’s no stopping you.” Stopping you from what? From further waiting? Yes, take some time to let that logic sink in. It’d be too easy to skip over it.
Unlike Bret Easton Ellis, Sdrigotti allows his ennui-inducing prose to think and to allude. In “Herne Hill” he references, among others, Walter Benjamin, Plato’s aporia, the Futurist Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, and director Alfred Hitchcock among the paragraphs of parataxis. Despite the unlikable characters who accomplish little, there are little nuggets buried throughout.
And with “nuggets” we can move into Sdrigotti’s 2018 book Shitstorm, published by Open Pen. Shitstorm will go down in history as the first book ratioed by its reviewers. There’s something about a book about Twitter that somehow encourages the playful worst in all of us.
If Sdrigotti’s short stories are Ellis-eque, then this novelette is almost Orwellian. In fact, it should be required reading, paired with Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” in political journalism programs, for it elegantly follows the various registers of shit writing and shit thinking and shit emoting online that culminate into the titular storm that has become the most meaningful context in which we live.
While the author keeps from openly critiquing the characters in his short stories, his deadpan commentary on the ways of the Shitstorm let you know exactly how he sees his role as chief shit-meteorologist: “Soon the case of the white hunter with his bow and arrow and his issues or ennui or a combination of several things finds its way to the UK, the Shangri La of the opinion piece, where every once well-reputed newspaper or sensationalistic rag is now a blog kept by unpaid interns, where every half-chewed thought has a home as long as it is a cheaply-acquired whim likely to get clicks.”
Just when you think the book is more or less the equivalent of those signs hanging in toilets the world over reminding people not to flush foreign objects, it turns into something graceful and poetic in the final sections. The tones of both books are different, but both have something quite profound to say about our world despite Sdrigotti’s reluctance to become our new Paulo Coelho. For this, the author deserves our respect. I just wouldn’t recommend shaking his hand when you meet him.
