For anyone looking to have a lighthearted conversation, don't chat up a journalist who writes about the climate crisis and is working on a book about the atomic bomb, especially if that journalist is also justifiably freaked out about worldwide terrorism and rising authoritarianism. In other words, avoid Paolo, the narrator of Tasmania, a brilliantly unsettling, semiautobiographical novel by Paolo Giordano, translated from the Italian by Antony Shugaar. And to those who wonder what a natural splendor like Tasmania has to do with a book about global threats: as one character puts it, the Australian island state would be a great place to buy land in case of apocalypse. How's that for a tourism slogan?
In one magnificently conceived sequence after another, Giordano charts Paolo's intellectual and personal journey, starting with his 2015 trip to Paris for a United Nations climate conference, which he convinced the newspaper Corriere della Sera to let him cover so he could escape his travails. These include his and his wife Lorenza's inability to have a child after three years of "blind determination." Another is his increasing obsession with the attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Other relationships increase his distress, including college friend Giulio, who needs Paolo's help during a nasty divorce, and the physicist Novelli, who studies climate models yet cheerily points out that there are "a trillion far more distinctive and idiosyncratic threats" than climate change. Gloom and doom can be hard to take, but Giordano's propulsive prose and intellectual rigor make this novel a thrilling experience. --Michael Magras, freelance book reviewer