Einaudi Publishing House

Einaudi Publishing House appears in the novel’s account of its literary debts as the publisher of books connected to three different chapters. These references range from a borrowed descriptive sentence to research on bereavement and a book about memory and absence, showing how the novel acknowledges specific sources behind its language and ideas.

References in the Afterword

The afterword identifies Einaudi as the publisher of Mario Vargas Llosa’s The War of the End of the World, naming its original publication in 1981 and its Italian edition, translated by Angelo Morino, in 1983. The note concerns a physical description of Duccio Chilleri, known as the Unspeakable, in the chapter “The Eye of the Storm”: a stretch of that description derives from the novel’s opening line. Einaudi is thus associated with a direct literary debt that the afterword makes explicit.

Bereavement and Language

The chapter “Shakul & Co.” draws part of its discussion of words for parents who have lost a child from Concita De Gregorio’s I Know It’s Spring Outside, published by Einaudi in 2015. The afterword also traces two verses quoted in that chapter to Fabrizio De André, distinguishing the book’s contribution to its inquiry into naming grief from the verses’ separate source.

Memory and Emmenalgia

A third reference concerns Him, Me, Us, published by Einaudi Stile Libero in 2018 and mentioned in “Third Letter about the Hummingbird.” The afterword describes it as a three-voice long story centered on the memory and absence of Fabrizio De André, written by Dori Ghezzi with Giordano Meacci and Francesca Serafini. It connects the book to the chapter’s creation of the term “emmenalgia,” presenting the new word as evidence of the work’s attention to Italian language as well as to De André’s memory.

Significance

Across these notes, Einaudi’s role is not presented through its institutional history or publishing practices, but through the particular books the novel acknowledges. The references map a range of literary debts: borrowed description, language for parental bereavement, and a work of memory whose subject and verbal invention resonate with the novel’s own concerns. By naming editions, dates, translators, and collaborators, the afterword makes those debts concrete rather than leaving them as uncredited influence.