The Imbecile

The Imbecile is about a woman who believes her father’s death may have been a suicide.

Salvius Chisciotte is an avid climber who dies scaling a mountain he’d summited many times. Isabella is his long estranged daughter. She hadn’t spoken to either parent in over a decade, and did not attend her mother’s funeral when she died from a drug overdose two years prior to Chisciotte’s death.

Isabella wants to find out what the last years of her father’s life were like, and needs to know if he died by accident or by his own hand. She enlists a forensic psychologist to seek out some trace of meaning in the loss of a man she adored now that reconciliation is impossible.

The story unfolds from four perspectives: the first person narrative of Chisciotte until the moment of his death, the omniscient narrator, and the third person views of the daughter and the psychologist. These competing voices seek to create as visceral and vertiginous an experience for the reader as an alpine ascent. And they serve to illuminate a character that ought not easily exist in this or any time: an incorruptible altruist possessed of unquenchable ambition.

Hubris exemplified and humility personified.