By David Mehegan

An absorbing novel that builds steadily, not to a shattering or violent conclusion (all the violence is in the past or offstage) but to a quiet release that is humane and persuasive.

Tasmania by Paolo Giordano.Translated, from the Italian, by Antony Shugaar. Other Press. 360 pp. Paper. $18.99.

What is one to make of a work of fiction described by its publisher as a “semiautobiographical novel”? “Semi”? You mean only half of it is “true”? Many or most novels make some use of a writer’s lived experience without such an explicit announcement, so why call our attention to it? I suspect it has to do with the insidious assumption that there is really no such thing as fiction; it’s all sneakily based on the author’s own life, which is why interviewers of novelists tend to want to know, “Was there someone like this character in your own life”, or “Did something like this happen to you?”

Such grousing came to seem unimportant as I read more deeply into this absorbing novel. It is unquestionably a work of imagination. Even if it is “based upon” a real life — as filmmakers tell us in order to excuse their distortions of biography — no one could remember personal actions, feelings, experiences, and dialogues to this degree of detail.

It might seem strange to designate as “absorbing” a novel with little sustained action and no clear plot, in which the story is as undirected as the one who tells it. At a point well beyond a hundred pages, restless readers might find themselves asking, as I did, “What is going on here, where is all this going?” And yet patience is rewarded. There is an undertone of coiling tension that builds steadily, not to a shattering or violent conclusion (all the violence is in the past or offstage) but to a quiet release that is humane and persuasive.

Paolo, the narrator in his mid-thirties, is a journalist but it is not clear if he is a full-time staffer of Corriere della Sera, the Milan-based newspaper, or a semi-regular freelancer. In fact, it’s not clear if he has an actual job. He calls himself a writer, not a reporter. He is married to Lorenza, a few years older than him, who has a teenage son from her first marriage. They live in Rome. At the same time, Paolo is seeking a master’s degree in communication in Trieste and teaches a journalism class there.

As the story opens, they are trying to have children but their medical and pharmaceutical interventions aren’t working, and Lorenza abruptly and ambiguously tells Paolo, “I’m no longer willing to.” She gives no explanation for this curious formulation; he does not press for one, so we don’t understand either. Indeed throughout the story we get into nobody’s mind except Paolo’s. We see what he sees, hear what he hears, and have no other way but his of understanding — quite as often misunderstanding — what is happening with others. That means that his frequent confusion becomes ours.

Paolo begs Corriere della Sera to assign him to cover the 2015 Paris climate-change conference. He even promises to pay his own expenses and stay with a friend. His motivation is unclear, since he writes, “At that time, my own little personal catastrophe loomed much larger in my mind than did its planetary counterpart.”

That comment is the leitmotif of the novel and its sensibility colors everything that happens. One disaster of terrorism is described after another — in Paris, in London, in Manila, and the historical horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki — all in the background, while Paolo and Lorenza’s marriage seems to be falling apart. “Seems” because neither partner makes a definitive break, no lovers enter the picture, and though it seems that Paolo loves Lorenza, he never says so explicitly to her or us and we don’t find out until the end how she feels about him. Before that happens, in the midst of many chapters of swirling but low-key action among several characters in Paolo’s circle I found myself asking, “What is it that you people want?”

Paolo Giordano. Photo: Marco Cella

Paolo’s indecision is central. He can’t file stories from Paris because, he says, “The environment is a boring topic. Interminable, devoid of action and tragedy, unless you consider the slow-moving tragedies yet to arrive. On the other hand, drowning in good intentions.” It sounds like his life. What he really wants is to research and write a book about the atomic bombing of Japan, from the point of view of the people on the ground. Here again he expends great effort and much of what he learns about the agony of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki victims is presented in excruciating detail. Again, however, he cannot marshal the energy or resolution to get anything written. He sees, he feels, but he cannot act.

“The book on the bomb had run aground,” he says, “the suspicion was looming ever larger that there really was nothing new left to say, and that there was nothing new that I could say.” He had read Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb backwards and forwards as well as John Hersey’s Hiroshima. “So was there any room for me to write anything? All the same, I continued.” It recalls that line from Beckett’s novel The Unnamable: “I can’t go on. I’ll go on.”

Three other principal characters’ talk and behavior fill the book. First, there’s Paolo’s old college roommate Giulio, locked in a custody battle with his ex-wife; second, a distinguished but controversial physicist named Novelli whom Paolo befriends; third, a priest friend named Karol who has conceived a passion for a college girl and wants Paolo’s advice on assignations. These three, all very different, have one thing in common with Paolo: their lives are in disarray and they seem unable to resolve anything.

As for the title, nobody goes to Tasmania. It is the best place of refuge, Novelli calculates, from a future nuclear war. What Paolo lacks, it is increasingly clear, is his own private Tasmania.

The extended irresolution of this novel is a surface manifestation of the deeper world which Paolo inhabits. In this world, which we inhabit too, nothing is done about climate change, about terrorism, or especially about the threat of nuclear holocaust, which is still with us, perhaps closer than we think. A giant asteroid could be found to be hurtling toward earth and we earthlings would be unable to come together and act in defense. We can ignore or not hear that ominous undertone which rumbles in our world like the foreshocks of a temblor, as well as in this novel, while we and Giordano’s characters are preoccupied with personal catastrophes.

David Mehegan is the former Book Editor of the Boston Globe. He can be contacted at djmehegan@comcast.net.