This anthology serves as a literary map to guide readers through the varied geography of contemporary Italian fiction. Massimo Riva has gathered English-language translations of short stories and excerpts from novels that were originally published in Italian between 1975 and 2001. As an expression of a communal contemporary condition, these narratives suggest a new sensibility and a new way of seeing, exploring, and inhabiting the world, in writing.
Riva provides a comprehensive introduction to Italian literary trends of the past twenty years. Each selection is preceded by a short introduction and biography of the writer. For English-language readers who are familiar with the work of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, this collection presents an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the work of other important contemporary Italian writers of fiction.
This anthology serves as a literary map to guide readers through the varied geography of contemporary Italian fiction. Massimo Riva has gathered English-language translations of short stories and excerpts from novels that were originally published in Italian between 1975 and 2001. As an expression of a communal contemporary condition, these narratives suggest a new sensibility and a new way of seeing, exploring, and inhabiting the world, in writing.
Riva provides a comprehensive introduction to Italian literary trends of the past twenty years. Each selection is preceded by a short introduction and biography of the writer. For English-language readers who are familiar with the work of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, this collection presents an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the work of other important contemporary Italian writers of fiction.
Italian Tales: An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction
Italian Tales: An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction
eBook
Available on Compatible NOOK devices, the free NOOK App and in My Digital Library.
Related collections and offers
Overview
This anthology serves as a literary map to guide readers through the varied geography of contemporary Italian fiction. Massimo Riva has gathered English-language translations of short stories and excerpts from novels that were originally published in Italian between 1975 and 2001. As an expression of a communal contemporary condition, these narratives suggest a new sensibility and a new way of seeing, exploring, and inhabiting the world, in writing.
Riva provides a comprehensive introduction to Italian literary trends of the past twenty years. Each selection is preceded by a short introduction and biography of the writer. For English-language readers who are familiar with the work of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, this collection presents an opportunity to acquaint themselves with the work of other important contemporary Italian writers of fiction.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780300129694 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Yale University Press |
| Publication date: | 10/01/2008 |
| Series: | Italian Literature and Thought |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Massimo Riva is professor of Italian studies at Brown University. He is the author of Saturno e le Grazie, Malinconie del Moderno, and numerous essays on modern and contemporary Italian literature, and is a leader in the application of digital technologies to the study and teaching of literature.
Read an Excerpt
Italian Tales
An Anthology of Contemporary Italian FictionYALE UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 2004 Yale UniversityAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-300-09530-2
Chapter One
The Keeper of RuinsGesualdo Bufalino
Gesualdo Bufalino's "The Keeper of Ruins" is the first of four late modern variations, presented in this section, on a neoclassical view: the Italian landscape with ruins. In Bufalino's story, a nocturnal invention representative of this Sicilian writer's "baroque" style, the relics of wrecked cars, like "stubborn caryatids remaining upright after the collapse of the architrave," provide the equivalent of a late twentieth-century Piranesian perspective on the ruins of civilization. Bufalino (b. 1920, Comiso, Sicily, d. 1996 in a car accident) came to critical attention only in the 1980s, when he was already in his sixties. The son of a blacksmith, he was apprenticed as a child (from 1930 to 1935) in the bottega of a Sicilian chariot painter. Briefly imprisoned in Friuli during the war, he fell ill with tuberculosis and after the armistice spent time in a sanatorium. Upon his recovery, he returned to Sicily and took a job teaching in secondary schools, in Vittoria, near his hometown. In 1950, he began work on his first book, The Plague-Sower, which remained unpublished until 1981, when it was awarded theCampiello, a prestigious literary prize. As critic Peter Hainsworth has written: "In all his books ... [Bufalino] chooses to write in a high literary form of Italian, which he knowingly and ironically cultivates ... [as] a barrier against the false certainties of the conversational, no-nonsense language which modern media and habits of mind both prefer." But his deliberate adoption of "the machinery of high literature," his "delight in literary excess," is not entirely free of parody, like "a schoolboy's, or a schoolmaster's, charade."
The Keeper of Ruins by Gesualdo Bufalino
Call it coincidence, call it vocation, but I've done next to nothing all my life but watch over things dead or dying. Now that I'm getting on in years, and can look back from an eminence near the summit, I never cease to be struck, among the random zigzags and paradoxes of my journey, by this persistent thread which gives them, or at least seems to give them, the lie. Maybe it is true that each man carries loyalty to a certain voice inherent in his very blood, and that he cannot but obey that voice, however many defections occasion may incite him to. Thus destiny appears to have assigned me to perpetual sentry-duty, to be keeper not of laws or of treasure hoards but of tombs and ruins; if not, indeed, of nobody and of nothing ...
I remember that as a child, whenever we played cops and robbers, all the cops and all the robbers immediately agreed to cast me in the role of "It." All very well, had they not been equally unanimous, once I was hiding my eyes, in dropping hostilities and sauntering off, leaving me all innocent around the corner, ears astrain for nonexistent enemies.
Later, one wartime Christmas night, it fell to my lot to stamp my feet for cold on picket duty outside an ammunition dump-empty and disused for years as I learnt next morning from the corporal who came to relieve me. What quaint military philosophy, to demand obedience to an heroic code even when its raison d'être is dead and buried ... I (having been through high school) thought of Catherine the Great's famous sentry, destined never to leave his rickety sentry-box, and I persuaded myself that his fate was an emblem for me, maybe for all of us ...
But to my tale. I'll mention two other periods in my life, not imposed on me by others, but sought out and chosen by me: the time I was caretaker of a graveyard; and when I was keeper of a lighthouse. The first was a task more cheerful and health-giving than you might suppose, with that smooth enamelled green on fine sunny days, and the peaceful tedium of it, the tiny lizardess cheekily peeking through a crack in a tombstone and the marble angel signposting heaven with three remaining fingers ...
A village graveyard this, with visitors once in a blue moon tethering their mules to the gate like wild-western gunslingers hitching their horses to a post, then making for some tombstone, categorical and glum, their arms encumbered with chrysanthemums. On leaving they would hand me a tip-fruit and vegetables-and exhort me to change the water in the vases and keep the grass trim. Little did they know that every evening I had sweeter dealings with those shades, and that (better far than all these insipid wreaths) I would console them with an impromptu recital on the mandolin.
It didn't last. Migliavacca's Mazurka seemed a blasphemy to Rinzivillo the road-mender, as he squatted down beyond the wall on business of his own, no less perturbed than disturbed by the plucking of my strings. I was denounced, surprised in flagrante delicto of sound, forgiven, caught at it again ... I got the sack, I took my leave. But not before I had rejoiced the dead, grave by grave, with one last serenade.
I had better luck with the lighthouse. If I left in the end it was of my own free will and the urge for change. Needless to say it was a derelict lighthouse, built long since at the expense of a fishermen's co-operative to pinpoint the coast with the intermittent flash of its lantern; a useless lighthouse now, since in those waters not a smack put to sea and the last fisherman was dead. Not even the steamers passing far offshore, opulent with radar and similar devilries, could now require our morsel of light, our paltry Tom Thumb's crumbs ... So I set myself up there by general consent, and made myself master of the place, on condition that I give the machinery an occasional run to prevent it rusting, and keep the windows shipshape, and tickle the trippers on Bank Holiday nights by sullying the moonlight with the bi-chromatic hide-and-seek of my great gyrating lantern. In the summer I enjoyed this assignment as small-time pyrotechnist, nor did I crave any other contact with my fellow men than this: to look down from my eyrie on all their sheeplike meekness and count their heads from the porthole of my quarters, all high and mighty inside my lantern, unique and out of reach ...
Winter was another story. With beaches deserted and houses shuttered up, I devised myself histrionic pastimes. Swathed in my Man-of-Aran oilskins I'd go out of an evening on to the circular gallery, torch in hand to cleave out warnings of an imaginary cyclone or still more imaginary shipwreck. Or else (and more frequently) I would write lines to declaim before the mirror:
As the perfidious keeper of a lighthouse I lure the boats that seek me on to the rocks And snigger to myself, and rub my hands ...
O yes, I wrote these words and more besides, and what d'you think came of it? A customs officer confiscated my notebook when he came snooping round, convinced that from my vantage point I was tipping the wink to the smugglers' motorboats. He turned the place upside down, for those lines, the long and the short of them, looked to him like the code of some wireless telegraph; in those black and white marks he descried the esoteric corpus delicti of a very palpable crime. He was only half wrong.
You find me today ensconced in my ultimate stronghold: a carwrecker's yard. Here I am monarch and God Almighty on the best of all possible thrones. I even earn something. People come from all over to bring me, gratis, the wreckage of every car-crash, with the blood of the slain still wet on the mudguards. Others come searching for odd bits and pieces, spares unobtainable elsewhere, buried in the scrap-heap: a door, a baffle, a deflector ... I am happy. Far more so than that Greek sentry of old (remember?) on the roof of Agamemnon's palace, crouched on his elbows like a dog, probing the assemblies of the stars and the secrets of their rising and setting ... Ah no, at my side-unlike his-there stalks no fear. I still have my mandolin and if I sing it is not to banish ghosts but to summon them.
Happy: there's no other word for it. Here is the haven towards which, groping, I have moved; here I find a meaning for the race I have run, if it has been a race; for my flight, if it has been a flight.
How do I stay alive? Being moderate by nature, that's no problem. I have a small hut to sleep in. A minibus (minus the seats) does me for kitchen, pantry and dining-room. On a gas-ring I cook Spartan fare, and consume it with mock ceremonial, Grand Hotel style, playing waiter and diner in turn. A little act for which I solemnly award myself cheers or jeers before retiring to my sleeping quarters with a humdrum pack of cards to sample the delights of solitaire. I know every kind there is, but I love to think up new ones, the better to grapple with the radiant sequences of suits from Ace to King and the baffling surprises of the odd man out. And if I lose more often than I win, that merely doubles the metaphysical ecstasy of daring to wager against the vainglory of God. In any case, what is more sedative, more sleep-inveigling, than nursing the hope of getting one's own back?
As for chit-chat, I never indulge in it with a living soul, bar a yes or no to customers and a few quips to the driver of the breakdown lorry, who delivers my stock-in-trade every Monday. For all other needs I exploit every mechanical and chemical resource my quarry of old iron and sheet-metal has to offer. In the cold winter months, for instance, I burn leftover oil from some dismantled engine; in the height of summer I run a radiator fan off a battery. Lighting? From a generator. Water? From a big truck-tank hoisted above the roof. I shave with an old cut-throat razor with the aid of a rearview mirror; for my afternoon nap I seek out the reclining seat of an elderly Lancia Flaminia; the hour of noon I sound for myself on a car-horn.
You'll say it's a Robinson Crusoe kind of life, and so be it. Even though I live smack beside the motorway, and see the live cars hurtling monstrously past no more than a hundred yards away. But I'm certainly not short of space. The clearing I camp in is State property, a plot of land expropriated to give elbow room to the earthmoving operations. The debris of loose earth, brown or chalky, bulldozed at that time on to the grass, has little by little killed it. Pounded by countless feet and wheels, the soil has forgotten the seasons of sap and of seed-time, conserving a scant relict of them only in three trees in a row, like three stubborn caryatids remaining upright after the collapse of the architrave.
They it is, in my design for a city, that represent The Garden. I am, you see, pursuing a project, that of tracing the geometry of a city with the skeletons of motorcars. Not, therefore, scattering them haphazardly in the first vacant space, but arranging them in order and in line, their skulls aimed in the appointed direction, to create a semblance of buildings bordering a High Street or ringing a Circus. In my dream town I already have a gridiron of zones, according to the precepts of Hippodamus, with streets ready christened: Blue Simca Street, Three Renaults Boulevard, Lame Alfa Alley (No Thoroughfare) ... A main square is coming into being, encompassed around with black limousines; in the centre, convoluted, for all the world like an equestrian tumour, is the carcass of a bus which impact warped and fire blackened with leprous burns. Thus, unconsciously, with these aligned and lidded sepulchres, I have been creating a replica of the country graveyard of my youth. So much so that, come All Souls' Day, I would not be surprised to see the former proprietors of each vehicle return to revisit it bearing flowers, and to hear Rinzivillo bawl me out once more from beyond the wall, before squatting down to his business ...
No one comes, of course; but all the same, as I pace at cockcrow between scrap-metal hedges, I try to imagine in each interior the forms of life which one time hovered there. I hearken to amorous whispers, words of wrath, fevered or fatuous stirrings of the heart. A people of the dead roams my domain from end to end, an invisible flock that dotes on me and which I feed as the spirit moves me. Not without special regard for the showpieces: the Mercedes of a murder victim, its windscreen milky from bulletry; a massive hearse behind which it is hard not to conjure up a cortège, crêpe and muffled drums, black-masked horses, black-plumed cuirassiers ...
I have particular esteem for these specimens, and never fail to bid them a fond goodnight. "Nine o'clock and all's well," I murmur, and almost feel I am putting them to bed and tucking in the blankets.
Think what you may I am not a madman, nor yet a novice in life. Who can say it is I who am wrong, not you, if I am content with my harvest of ashes, and glory only in history dead and done for, in the allurements of dereliction? In truth there is nothing in the world outside but to me is foreign or hostile: I have nothing to do with it, I don't understand it. Even of the woman who visits me occasionally from the Autogrill I ask no news of peace or war; I get the thing done with brief, technical gestures, send her packing, and become once more the voluptuary of solitude ...
Put to the test of old age, what will become of me? When, like a noble river at the estuary, I silt up, and am myself reduced to a catastrophe to be cared for?
The future holds no fears for me. Whatever end awaits me it is sure that elsewhere, after death, I shall have to mount guard once more. I know, but will not tell you, over which absence or impotence or ruin.
Translated by Patrick Creagh
Zardino
Sebastiano Vassalli
Sebastiano Vassalli's historical novel The Chimera is set in a rural Piedmont village in the seventeenth century. In Vassalli's opening paragraph, the present slowly fades out and the remote past comes into focus: a cinematic technique reminiscent of Alessandro Manzoni's famous introduction to his historical masterpiece I promessi sposi (also set in the seventeenth century), with its long and wandering zoom into the landscape surrounding Lake Como. Yet between these two almost symmetrical openings lies the entire parabolic evolution of the modern historical novel. In the work excerpted here, the ever-present fog clouding the Padania landscape parallels the clouding of anthropological memory. The writer, as a time traveler and investigative archeologist, must first of all unearth history, or better his story: the story of Antonia, the "witch of Zardino," resurrected by its late twentieth-century chronicler. After an early start as a poet and playwright, Vassalli (b. 1941, Genoa) won recognition in the 1970s as a gifted avant-garde experimental fiction writer, influenced by Manganelli's metafictions. In the mid-1970s, he repudiated the avant-garde and went on to what critics have called a "middle period," culminating with Abitare il vento (Living in the Wind, 1980, a stream-of-consciousness record of a militant terrorist), before moving decisively in the direction of more traditional narrative codes. In The Chimera, he gives us an indirect explanation for his own later development into a maker of historical fictions accessible to a much wider readership: "I asked myself what on earth can help us to understand the things of the present unless they are in the present? Then it dawned on me. Looking out over this landscape, the nothingness of it, it came to me that in the present there is no story worth telling. The present is hubbub." Vassalli reserves the right to freely intertwine history and fiction (Antonia, the witch of Zardino, is an entirely fictional character), and he remains interested in what he calls the "archeology of the present," also the title of one of his last novels. History, Vassalli once said, is worth living and can be endured only thanks to the stories we tell ourselves.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Italian Tales Copyright © 2004 by Yale University. Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgments....................ixIntroduction Mapping Contemporary Italian Fiction....................xi
PROLOGUE Consuming the View Luigi Malerba....................3
PART I Ruins with a View The Keeper of Ruins Gesualdo Bufalino....................11
Zardino Sebastiano Vassalli....................21
The Self-Awareness of the Labyrinth Giorgio Manganelli....................40
Lost Road Gianni Celati....................61
PART II Memory Lanes The Penumbra We Have Crossed Lalla Romano....................79
On the Neverending Terrace Anna Maria Ortese....................90
The Piazza Fabrizia Ramondino....................100
Great Bear, Little Bear Ginevra Bompiani....................117
PART III Vanishing Points Windswept Lane Antonio Tabucchi....................129
Reaching Dew Point Daniele Del Giudice....................144
Montedidio Erri De Luca....................157
Leo's World Pier Vittorio Tondelli....................168
PART IV Views from Afar The Sea Voyage of Baron Mandralisca Vincenzo Consolo....................189
Melodrama Pier Maria Pasinetti....................201
From the Diary of Baron Scarpia Paola Capriol....................210
The Day of Thanksgiving Paolo Valesio....................221
EPILOGUE Leave-taking Franco Ferrucci....................245
Credits....................257