The Vanishing (Dissipatio H.G.) by Guido Morselli.

You've probably heard of Calvino, Ferrante, Eco, and the other (few) Italian writers who regularly get recommended to English-speaking readers. Maybe you've even heard of Buzzati and Sciascia. But here's one you may not have heard of: Guido Morselli . His novel Dissipatio H.G. ( The Vanishing ) is one of the strangest books I've read. Imagine waking up one morning and discovering that every other human being has disappeared . No apocalypse. No explanation. No bodies. Just an empty world. What follows isn't really a survival story. The protagonist isn't desperately searching for food, rebuilding civilization, or fighting monsters. Instead, he walks through the abandoned world and thinks . He thinks about loneliness. Civilization. Death. The absurdity of existence. And, perhaps most unsettlingly, about what it means to be the last person alive when there is no one left to impress. (If a social animal speaks in an empty forest, has he really spoken?) Morselli wrote it in the 1970s but, like all good philosophy, it feels weirdly contemporary. It's short (140 pages), bleak, darkly funny, philosophical, and occasionally surreal. The style is exquisite to the point of elitism, as is customary for Morselli. Morselli never became the novelist he arguably deserved to be. He lived unpublished for various reasons. Sometimes his personality was too abrasive. Sometimes he wrote novels that exposed the workings of the Italian Communist Party and submitted them to communist editors. That kind of thing. He lived as a "farmer" (that was the occupation listed on his ID) and he died by suicide in 1973. All of his books were published posthumously. If you like Kafka, Beckett, Ballard, or literary science fiction, this might be worth a look.