Tommasso Landolfi
Dan Clore
New York: Viking, 1986. Introduction by Italo Calvino.
Translated and edited by Katherine Jason.
reviewed by Dan Clore
Not often does one discover a world-class writer previously
unknown to one, and even less often one who wrote excellent
work in the horror field. The works in the present volume
qualify, and about half of them belong to the horror field.
These stories originally appeared in Italian between 1937
and 1978.
I suppose the academics would label these stories "magic
realism", the current term for any non-formulaic fantastic
writing, especially any with avant-garde elements. In truth,
Landolfi derives both his strengths and weaknesses from
coming outside of the current scene; the idea of one,
"Chicken Fate", would now hardly merit a short-short, and
one with a rather obvious punch-line at that.
The rest, however, only benefit from the writer using his
odd imagination and personal obsessions in place of generic
conventions. In a few, he plays off of generic common-places
with weird twists of his own. "The Labrenas" utilizes the
old weird-events vs. hallucinating narrator ambiguous
plot-line, but that description omits the bizarre nature of
those events, which include a hilarious take-off on Poe's
"The Premature Burial" and some business involving mysterious
lizards. "The Werewolf" attempts to control his problem by
covering the moon with soot.
Many of these stories deal with sexual matters, and these
would stand out in any of the current crop of erotic horror
anthologies. Some of these deal with misogyny intertwined
with sexual desire, including "The Provincial Night," "Maria
Giuseppa", "A Woman's Breast", and "Uxoricide", which opens
with the classic lines "Murdering people is easy. I have
never understood all the fuss murderers make . . . Take me:
when I decided that I wanted to, indeed that I had to, murder
my wife . . . [ellipsis in original] Huh, what? Why did I
want to or have to kill her? Don't play the hypocrites,
don't make me laugh: if you take any husband and wife, it's
obvious that one of the two individuals is too many."
Another story, "Gogol's Wife", deals with that Russian
writer's little-known household disputes with his wife, a
talking inflatable sex-doll. Like another (non-horror) story
here, "Personaphilologicaldramatic Conference with Implications",
this reaches a fever pitch of offbeat humor.
Another story, "The Kiss", manages to be erotic in the true
sense, rather than just sexual in content. Further, it
accomplishes that rarest of achievements, it arouses a true
sense of the weird, the uncanny, and the eldritch. The
story's ending does nothing to reduce its sense of
all-pervasive mystery, and it's almost unheard-of blending
of the erotic with the weird will stay with the reader for
a very long time. Easily one of the genre's greatest classics.
Some of the stories here present a great opportunity for
anthologists; meanwhile, get the book and read them yourself.
Not many works succeed both as horror and as literature, but
those in this volume definitely do, and they deserve a wider
audience. I should add that while these belong to the
avant-garde, no one should find them difficult to understand.
--
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Dan Clore
The Website of Lord We˙rdgliffe:
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paghat
WIFE and other stories, is a longtime favorite that I try to keep in my
shop stock as much as I can because of its recommendability. "The Kiss"
lingers long in my memory. Less well known is Jose Maria Gironella a
Catalon Spanish writer who in the early 1960s had a psychotic episode that
lasted three years. He started writing stories about his experience even
before it ended, resulting in a Poe-like obsessive atmospheric collection
entititled PHANTOMS AND FUGITIVES: Journeys to the Improbable. SF editor
Terry Carr anthologized one of these tales but it otherwise passed
unnoticed in genre circles.
-jessica salmonson
Dan Clore
>
> Landolfi's collection, and his scarce earlier selection in English GOGOL'S
> WIFE and other stories, is a longtime favorite that I try to keep in my
> shop stock as much as I can because of its recommendability. "The Kiss"
> lingers long in my memory. Less well known is Jose Maria Gironella a
> Catalon Spanish writer who in the early 1960s had a psychotic episode that
> lasted three years. He started writing stories about his experience even
> before it ended, resulting in a Poe-like obsessive atmospheric collection
> entititled PHANTOMS AND FUGITIVES: Journeys to the Improbable. SF editor
> Terry Carr anthologized one of these tales but it otherwise passed
> unnoticed in genre circles.
I'll have to take note of the recommendation. It seems that so many
non-genre writers produce excellent work that could easily be considered
genre, and go entirely unnoticed. Landolfi I thought was entirely my own
discovery (from a couple anthologies of avant-garde fiction with the
hilarious "Gogol's Wife" story), until I heard that Thomas Ligotti had
recommended his work....
--
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Dan Clore
The Website of Lord Weÿrdgliffe:
paghat
> paghat wrote:
> >
> > Landolfi's collection, and his scarce earlier selection in English GOGOL'S
> > WIFE and other stories, is a longtime favorite that I try to keep in my
> > shop stock as much as I can because of its recommendability. "The Kiss"
> > lingers long in my memory. Less well known is Jose Maria Gironella a
> > Catalon Spanish writer who in the early 1960s had a psychotic episode that
> > lasted three years. He started writing stories about his experience even
> > before it ended, resulting in a Poe-like obsessive atmospheric collection
> > entititled PHANTOMS AND FUGITIVES: Journeys to the Improbable. SF editor
> > Terry Carr anthologized one of these tales but it otherwise passed
> > unnoticed in genre circles. -Jessica
>
> I'll have to take note of the recommendation. It seems that so many
> non-genre writers produce excellent work that could easily be considered
> genre, and go entirely unnoticed. Landolfi I thought was entirely my own
> discovery (from a couple anthologies of avant-garde fiction with the
> hilarious "Gogol's Wife" story), until I heard that Thomas Ligotti had
> recommended his work.... -Dan Clore
One more to make a real effort to find is Mercé Rodereda's MY CHRISTINA &
Other Stories. It was distributed mainly as a trade paperback but there
WAS a small hardcover run that is painfully hard to find but worth
whatever is asked for a fine copy. Rodereda wrote in Catalan which for
many years was a suppressed language in Spain, during which time Rodoreda
lived in penurious exile in Paris until dying of cancer the year before
this book appeared in English (1984)--a true martyr to fantastic
literature. This is one of the worldąs great collections of weird tales:
ghosts, witches, &c. Her translator called her the best and most important
Mediterranean woman writer after Sappho, and if you read this book you may
come away thinking such an extreme assessment not entirely hyperbole. The
story of a girl transformed into a salamander, who strives valiantly to
live normally even so, is so sad and poetic I will treasure that tale
until I die.
There's an essay at my website on some of the key magic realists' best
short story collections in English.
-Jessica
Violet Books: Antiquarian Supernatural Literature
http://www.violetbooks.com