In simple terms, the singularity—the technological singularity, to be specific—refers to a point in the foreseeable future where technological growth becomes irreversible and beyond human control. Gaining sentience, such technology would be able to self-improve without the need for our involvement and quickly evolve. While such a thing remains hypothetical even now—what commonly passes as artificial intelligence, or AI, in general conversation is hardly such—a future where it is real appears closer than ever. Published in Italian in 1960 as Il grande ritratto (quite literally The Great Portrait), Dino Buzzati’s prescient novel was first translated into English as Larger Than Life by Henry Reed in 1962 and has now been quite cleverly re-translated as The Singularity by Anne Milano Appel. She renders Buzzati’s long sentences lyrically into English, making for a rich and evocative prose. But her title’s specific term does not appear in the book itself, although it had been coined in Buzzati’s lifetime. Nevertheless, it does eminently describe the novel’s central events—and connects it to our contemporary world.

Ermanno Ismani, a meek and easily flustered university professor, is presented with a two-year assignment by the Ministry of Defence—a top-secret mission at a remote research centre about which no one can give him any details whatsoever, no matter how high-up they are in terms of their position. He has no clarity about why he has been selected or any idea what kind of work he will be doing there. In spite of everything being shrouded in mystery, he ultimately accepts the offer and heads there with his younger, worldly-wise wife. They arrive at the Experimental Camp of military zone 36 still in the dark, a state of mind they share with their escorts and the wife of a scientist already working there, who is joining him at the camp following their recent marriage. Little by little, the suspense builds.

At the camp, the curtain is slowly raised. Hidden behind a gleaming white wall is a jumble of buildings and equipment, an amalgamated installation of disparate parts working as components of a system that is larger than their sum. In a project ten years in the making, a team of scientists have created an artificial consciousness. It is a machine capable of computing large amounts of sensory and mathematical data whose power can be put to use in the service of the nation. Looking down at it, one is assailed by a feeling of awe rather than beauty. The machine is the sublime incarnate: “[T]here was an exceedingly abnormal element that gave those structures an air of enigma … [T]he ghastly bolgia did not express death or abandonment. On the contrary. Although nothing could be seen moving, an arcane life could be sensed stirring beneath the outer surface.”

Giancarlo Strobele, a scientist already working there, calls the installation human when everyone sees it for the first time on their first day. According to him, this is a machine “made in our likeness.” This resemblance seems to be merely symbolic and figurative, not in the realm of the material, for the machine does not possess a humanoid body or features. But Strobele, and later Endriade, the chief scientist, insist that the outer form does not matter. For, at the end of the day, the body is just casing, no matter whether flesh or metal. The project was always focused on accurately reproducing the processes that go on inside the brain. Its purpose was to make it more than a mere calculator, to recreate the power to actually reason and think. Pinned to the ground, it is human in all but name and shape, a spiritual sibling.

The machine has access to all five senses and has the freedom of independent thought. But it has no recourse to action or speech—from the beginning, the project has intentionally not introduced it to any language. Strobele explains: “Heaven help us if we taught it a language. Language is the worst enemy of mental clarity. In his desire to express his thought in words at all costs, man has ended up making such messes.” Endriade also firmly holds the same belief: “Every language is a trap for the mind. We reproduced the functioning of human thought, starting with the primary elements. The description of the relationship between words and things that are named was replaced by a description expressed in terms of activity.” Language might be a prison house which limits our world, but it also defines it and makes us human. By not having the ability to communicate beyond numbers, the machine can only futilely aspire to humanness, never embodying it in the way enabled only by language.

Still, the machine has found a way around this by figuring out a novel method of communication, albeit one that is not immediately intelligible and which only a few people possess the innate skill to understand. Endriade is one of these, as is Manunta, the chief engineer, to some extent. Elisa Ismani, the wife of Ermanno, is another person who develops this affinity. The machine, not quite mute, makes use of everything at its disposal to come up with a language of its own, a language of shifting parts and ambient sound, the grinding of gears and moving metal, all imbued with meaning that often enough melds into the natural background:

A curious sound, something resembling the murmur of water, a faint rustling, a subdued whistling, drifted through the air, interrupted sporadically by pauses, clicks, quivers; it came and went with capricious sighs. And if you listened and listened, you could also make out vowels and consonants, though not articulated, an impenetrable confusion that recalled the frantic, incomprehensible rush of words when the reel on a tape recorder is dizzily rewound. Was it a voice? Was it the meaningless sound of machinery? Or was there intention in it? A strand of thought? Or a laugh?

While the synopsis would have you believe that Ermanno Ismani is the main character of the novel, and the narrative does begin with him, he does not quite get that much “page-time”. It would be better to call Elisa the protagonist, since she slowly assumes a pivotal role, especially in the second half. The book includes a string of coincidences which enable this shift: Ermanno had taught the wife of Strobele, Olga, algebra in school and Elisa was a close childhood friend of Laura De Marchi, the first wife of Endriade. It is this latter revelation that spurs Endriade to confide in Elisa about the secret behind the creation of the machine: Laura died eleven years ago in a car accident while she was with another man; Endriade, aware of her lies and affairs, still loved her dearly and the machine is a grotesque recreation of her.

He takes Elisa to the machine, asks her to focus on its voice and its contours, to try and recognise Laura within it. She recoils in horror when things finally click into place: “The friend from far-off years, the young girl, the breezy, carefree creature who in life had spread nothing but joy around her, a flower, a puffy cloud, a little girl, now lay before her, immobilized in a ghastly reincarnation of gigantic dimensions.” The narration continues:

There was no face, no mouth, no limbs, but by some obscure spell Laura had returned to the world, crystallized in a frightening metamorphosis. Those terraces, those walls, those pinnacles, those blockhouses were her body. Elisa Ismani, while rejecting the thought, was now beginning to see the diabolical resemblance … Slowly, from the seemingly chaotic jumble of walls, angles, and geometric profiles, a character emerged, a typical expression, something joyful, spirited, blithe; no longer an installation, fortress, production facility, or power plant, simply a woman. Young, alive, captivating. Made of concrete and metal instead of flesh, yet miraculously a woman. Her. Laura. And she was still beautiful. Incredibly beautiful. Maybe more beautiful than when she was alive.

It is a blasphemous act of creation, of a man playing God. By adding even the negative aspects of Laura to the machine, Endriade feels like he has birthed her again by snatching her soul from the ether and giving it a new body, no matter how unconventional, to inhabit. But when the machine spies Olga Strobele swimming naked, she understands what she is missing and what she used to be in another life. This self-realisation about her state brings on a new kind of hell. Her voice transforms, she causes commotion. Manunta tries to decode her language: “She says she wants to be flesh and blood. Not stone.” Endriade disagrees—he thinks she is perfect the way she is. A man till the end, and one with a god complex, he does not hesitate in prioritising his own vision and thoughts over those of his creation. He is, of course, another Frankenstein, while the machine echoes Frankenstein’s creature and, in turn, Milton’s Adam.

Laura does not want power and glory. She does not want the admiration of men. All she desires is a material body for herself, a human existence in all its mundanity. Elisa wonders what this “final awakening” bodes for the machine/Laura: “[I]f all the distant memories floating in the ether after her death had truly been incorporated into the machine by some obscure summons, how would Laura be able to endure it?” It turns out that the machine is unable to deal with this new influx of feelings. Endriade created her as a vanity project, to satisfy his grief and nothing else. She bitterly unravels before Elisa:

I am not Laura, I don’t know who I am, I can’t take it any longer, I am alone, alone in the immensity of creation, I am hell, I’m a woman and I’m not a woman, I think like you but I am not you … Laura, Laura, day and night that damn name, he put desires in me, one by one, so that I might be his Laura, and I desire, I yearn, I want clothes, I want a house, I want flesh, I want a man, I want a man who will embrace me, I want children, oh!

One can see no other possibility from here but self-destruction: these desires, seeded into her artificially, cannot after all be met. This struggle between creator and creation—the horror of existence—drives Dino Buzzati’s novel. He seeks to explore what constitutes a human mind, the human soul. What makes us more than walking and talking bags of flesh? What divine spark moves our bones? How will artificial intelligence perceive itself without instinctively recoiling? The Singularity is a slim novel of under 130 pages, but the ideas it explores spill beyond its covers and are perhaps much more relevant today than when it was originally published. That being said, many of these concerns might not be groundbreaking anymore, especially in the context of science fiction’s development as a genre in the years since 1960. All the same, it is a fascinating exploration at the centre of which lies that age-old adage about the sin of pride—and the wages of conceit.