Gog (novel)

Gog

Author	Giovanni Papini
Translator	Mary Prichard Agnetti
Country	Italy
Language	Italian
Publisher	Firenze Vallecchi
Publication date	1931
Published in English	1931
Pages	389

Gog is a 1931 satirical novel by the Italian writer Giovanni Papini. It tells the story of Goggins, nicknamed Gog, a Hawaiian-American who made a fortune during World War I and travels around the world.

The book is a collection of excerpts from the imaginary diary of the character who gives the volume its name. The stories are characterized by a Huxley-like pessimism about the "brilliant destiny" offered to modern man by capitalist societies. Papini defines it as "a singular and symptomatic document: frightening, perhaps, but of a certain value for the study of man and our century", publishing it to "do something useful" to the reader, "because they can be seen better, in this enlargement grotesque, the secret (spiritual) diseases from which the present civilization suffers."

Gog had a sequel twenty years later, with The Black Book: Gog's New Diary (1951).

Plot summary

The author of the diary and the narrator of the story is Gog. "His real name was, it seems, Goggins but from an early age they had always called him Gog and he liked this diminutive because it surrounded him with a kind of biblical and fabulous halo: Gog king of Magog." Papini claims to having received the scattered sheets of Gog's diary directly from the author shortly before his death and having wanted to publish it after a long work of recomposing the various fragments.

Gog is a man from Hawaii, born to an indigenous mother and an unknown white father, who after a poor childhood and youth moves to the United States to become a multimillionaire. Disenchanted and dissatisfied, Gog leaves his job and decides to travel the world to try to understand the meaning of existence. During his long journey he meets the most exceptional men of his time, from Henry Ford to Vladimir Lenin, from Albert Einstein to Gandhi, from H.G. Wells to George Bernard Shaw. All these great characters disappoint Gog, who ends up having an ever lower consideration of the human race. Only in the concluding chapter of the book does Gog seem to regain confidence in humanity. Pretending to be poor, because "For those who have owned everything that can be bought in the world there is no refuge except in misery," he receives help from a little girl who, seeing him hungry, offers him a piece of bread. After eating Gog wonders "I have never tasted bread so good and rich. Could this be the true food of the soul? and this is real life?"

Reception

The French translation of the novel, made by René Patris d'Uckermann, won the Prix Nocturne in 2006.

External links

• Gog at Internet Speculative Fiction Database
• Gog e Il libro nero di Papini