Review: "Black Mountain" by Venero Armanno
As I finished the final page of Black Mountain, I felt as though I was emerging from my own great journey in the shadows of Sicily’s Mount Etna: filthy, grubby, and exhausted to the point of madness. Venero Armanno thrusts his readers into a world of Sicilian sulphur mines and recreates an often forgotten, unknown, or even ignored history of abusive child labour and greed. Then in a twist so unexpected that I considered suing for whiplash, Armanno introduces the futuristic scientific possibility that the human desire for unending “health and youth and longevity” (266) could lead to a world full of “useless egoists who’ll never die” (266). The vivid retelling of real life events juxtaposed with the sci-fi concept of eugenics is a clever exploration into the battle between human nature and human desire: what we are designed to do versus what we choose to do.
Through the literary device of metafiction, Armanno uses the diaries of Cesare Montenero, as a symbol of this battle. After writing a screenplay based on a repeated nightmare, Mark Alter is accused of plagerising a book written by Montenero, whose diaries Alter discovers.The reader is led to the discovery that the diaries are the memories of Montenero, and, therefore, a version (or past version) of Mark Alter’s own life: “So you’ve found me. And that means you’ve found yourself” (30). The metafiction suggests that if we are to live lives that are plagiarised from those before us, if we are genetically given lives “from one hand to the next” (266), we have to learn from the past in order to craft our own future.
The connection made in Black Mountain between plagiarism and eugenics is a fascinating one. The novel raises questions of identity, ownership, and parentage: if one is to unknowingly repeat the work of another, does it make it any less theirs? What Montenero learns, the lesson he wants to share, is that it is not where you come from, it is not the origins from which something, or someone, derives, but rather the choices they make that define them—it is the choice to “be who you are” (170) that defines an individual.
The names of the novel’s protagonist should not go unnoticed. In the beginning, as a young slave boy with no memory of his parents or a past, he is given the name Sette, which means seven. By being given a name, even one that is supposed to signify his lack of identity, Sette begins to build his own life, away from expectation and design; there is an ironic sense of freedom in his slavery that can only be appreciated on reflection.
The name of the novel also supports the idea that it is important to be who you are. Note how the novel is not named after something that links it to the theme of eugenics, but rather after something that defines Cesare as an individual, by connecting to a battle that he fought and won, a life that he lived. The novel takes its name from Cesare’s self-appointed surname, Montenero, again focusing on the idea of choosing who you want to be. In saying that though, there is irony in him being named after the roman emperor, Ceasar. This suggests that there is very little in the modern world that is not influenced or shaped by the past, whether it is done so deliberately through science or naturally through nurture.
So now that I have completed Black Mountain, I will take to my bed for a few days to rest my weary brain, but I know there is very little I can do to clean myself of all that I have learned about being human.
Who are you?
Who am I?
Am I really me?
