The Hill

“The Hill’s protagonist, and the novel’s narrator, is a former public relations officer at a publishing house and the Museum of Modern Art who abandons his bourgeois existence, book launches, exhibition openings, invitations and speeches in order to climb the hill that dominates the landscape of an unnamed island in the Adriatic and spend the whole summer at a deserted army blockhouse where he will guard the island from forest fire. There, in the company of a dog and an old donkey, he sees his life reach its climax. This is a deeply unsettling text, loaded with emotions almost to the point of breaking, full of traumatic experiences of a collapsed, imploded urban individual searching for the meaning of life. Will he find his catharsis?”