Under its polished surface Hollow Heart seethes with distress. As in Viola Di Grado’s debut novel, 70% Acrylic 30% Wool, the central figure is a student, Dorotea, a biologist; wintry Leeds has become Di Grado’s native Sicily, though the sunnier climate offers no remedy for the protagonist’s chronic depression. But if Camelia, in Leeds, flirted with ending her life, the twenty-five-year-old Dorotea has moved on: “In 2011 the world ended: I killed myself”, begins Hollow Heart. And since much of Di Grado’s strangely mesmerizing, bleakly comic style resides in its obsessive attention to detail, we also learn that on the morning of her death, preparing for a pre-suicide lunch with two girlfriends, Flavia and Gaia, Dorotea dons her “favorite dress, the red sleeveless one. Looking in the mirror I felt like Jessica Rabbit, but every impulse of self-respect I might have had was a round-trip ticket: after a couple of seconds outbound, I returned straight home to the nuisance of being myself”. Lunch done, Dorotea slips into the tub with a disposable razor and some mint bubble bath. It is July 23, precisely 3:29 in the afternoon. Then – we tilt into posthumous time – “my death propagated from Via Crispi 21 through all the neighboring streets, to the cathedral . . . amidst the wafting clouds of deodorant and suntan lotion”. Di Grado’s impeccably crisp sentences conjure up a cheery, shrink-wrapped, consumerist world, like an Andreas Gursky photograph of a dollar store. Stuff fills the void left by the novel’s largely unsatisfactory human relationships, and substantiates Dorotea’s existence as a viable, if disposable, object in a world of objects. As the novel shuttles backwards and forwards in time, from 1986, when Dorotea was born, to 2015, four years into her afterlife, she searches for a glimmer of meaning, a narrative, something to justify the ache of living. “Cure me, cure us”, she pleads: “My pain is collective . . . . I can furnish my pain with my thoughts, but it still remains nothing but a rental property”. Di Grado was twenty-three in 2011 when her first book was published. Ably translated by Antony Shugaar, Hollow Heart, like its predecessor, is ambitious and subversive, its nihilism accentuated – perhaps authorized – by a hard-edged, mass-market triviality cackling with canned laughter (“My mother created me at age twenty-six, on a rainy day, in a dark kitchen with microwaves and potholders shaped like animals”) and complicated by Dorotea’s intellectual pursuits, vulnerability and refusal, in her despair, to judge the failures of others. The day her troubled mother (“legs glistening with moisturizing cream”) asks, “When are you going to cut all this out?” Dorotea replies, “Mama, I’m hurting”. “You’re hurting? I ought to be the one who’s hurting.” “We’re both hurting.” The repartee speaks to Dorotea’s fairmindedness and her capacity, even in her bewilderment, for empathy. Flashbacks recount Dorotea’s “life” story, from the accident of her conception (“It was a hole in the condom”) to the episode of an aunt’s suicide to her single mother’s ineffective attempts to become an artist while earning her living – sort of – as a photographer of children’s clothing. Meanwhile the dead Dorotea, in her busy parallel world, stalks former lovers and makes new friends: the Isaiah-quoting Anna, who dreams of her body’s resurrection, and Eurydice la Scrittrice, a creative kindred spirit. Dorotea also tracks her body’s decay with the passion of a lab scientist: “09/11/2011: My cellular structures have definitively collapsed”. More poignantly, in death, she keeps a watchful eye on her mother, whose attempts to deal with her own sorrow increasingly affect her daughter: “It’s called love and it no longer hurts”, Dorotea says in a moment of grace at the novel’s end. There are pages when Hollow Heart seems to be spinning its wheels and the laughter feels forced; often the anatomy lessons cut uncomfortably close to the bone. Di Grado plays dead with discomfiting gusto, especially when she so graphically engages our sense of bodily disgust and fear of physical and mental disintegration. But if the excesses of her danse macabre are unsettling, Dorotea’s tale is surprisingly moving. This is, ultimately, a novel less about character than about a quest for an answer to metaphysical anguish – in other words, to death.