The Combover deals with a bald spot. Our hero goes to great lengths to cover the spot without resorting to a toupee. This is a family tradition. After an agonizing expose in a classroom (he's a professor in Italy) he decides to run away to Lapland. He gets on the wrong bus and ends up trying to be a hermit in the hills of Italy. I was briefly reminded of a Monty Python sketch about hermits organizing themselves into bridge clubs, but this takes a different track, though one also lacking the longed for seclusion. A delightful story. ( )

The Combover by Adrian N. Bravi, translated by Richard Dixon, is a story that readers experience on many levels. It is humorous on the surface level, as university researcher Arduino Gherarducci chooses to let his hereditary male pattern baldness affect much of his life. He is vulnerable to myriad daily humiliations as he attempts to comb over his bald pate using long hair grown from the fertile back of his head forward ending in bangs like an image of Nero. The flap of hair is subject to many disturbances by nature and human bullying. Studying library science and teaching the subject as a university lecturer, Arduino attempts to order his world by contrasting the classification system of a library that allows someone to find a particular book in the library with a more academic system. He studies “bibliographic data exchange formats” that organize the content of books so that readers can find multiple sources of the desired information. He understands that at the foundational level, the interrelation of all knowledge in the library is most important and greater than all of the surface classification and deep structure organization of data.

Arduino realizes this contrast of surface versus deep structure in libraries is like the countenance of people compared to their personality. In his case, his decision to use a combover strategy to deal with his baldness places him in a category of bald people who use a back to front approach rather than a side to side combing, or a shaved head technique. On the surface, everyone knows what he is doing and can categorize him like books on a shelf. His meek personality, however, is something that is hidden. Focusing on his baldness compensation does not reveal the motivations and emotions that distinguish him with his rich personal history from other individuals. Arduino understands his own surface and deep structure but must overcome his psychological separation from the world and realize his role in the collective human condition.

Using Spinosza’s book, Ethics, Arduino attempts to resolve the apparent incompatibility of his own three levels, surface, deep, and foundational, with Spinoza’s notion that nature has Oder Geometrically Demonstrated (all things are in God and nothing can be conceived without God). He discovers that no man is an island, and without the integration of the three levels of the human condition, he is only hiding in plain sight. Attempting to run from his situation, Arduino leaves his home in Recanati to travel to Lapland and finds on the way that no matter where he travels, there he is stuck with his disintegrated life that defies intellectual classification, artificial formatting and perhaps even his own existence as a person.

The ways Arduino resolves his living dilemma makes for a very interesting short novel. I enjoyed reading it and recommend The Combover to readers who like to identify with interesting characters and explore their own levels of existence. The writing style is simple and direct with an excellent translation by Mr. Dixon. ( )