The Quality of Light: Modern Italian Short Stories

Features short stories from Italy, including Pia Fontana's "Phobia" and Vincenzo Consolo's "The Photographer"

It would seem to be statistically impossible even for, say, the Finns to be as humorless as the writers represented in this collection. And Finns have food and weather worth grousing about. The lightest in a gray collection representing 22 Italian writers born between 1919 and 1959 is Enrico Palandri's ``PEC,'' about a man in the near future trying to obtain the Public Existence Card (PEC) that will allow him to buy food, drive cars and play a nasty little piece of one-upmanship called ``two by one.'' This isn't to say that the other stories are bad ; the book's dedicatee, Pier Vittorio Tondelli, offers a depiction of life among the petty drug pushers, thieves, addicts and homeless at ``The Station Bar'' worthy of Pasolini while other writers contribute interesting but circumscribed riffs--Marina Mizzau on making a martini; Pia Fontana on phobias; Goffred Parisi on friendship; Antonio Tabuchi on a whale hunt. It's just that so many are trying so hard to be serious that they lose track of common humanity and will lose many readers as well. Pieces by Rosetta Loy, Gianni Celati and Nanni Balestrini read like verbal recountings of the plot of L'Avventura , long on rapid cuts, mysterious auras and implications, short on any emotional depth.

Copyright 1994 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Ann and Michael Caesar (Italian, Cambridge and the Univ. of Kent, respectively) have here collected 22 modern Italian short stories. Most appear in English for the first time, and, in the editors' words, all reflect "the variety, and the quality, of Italian story-telling of the past two decades." As the title suggests, a common element--and occasional actor--in many of these fine stories is, in fact, the strange and elusive quality of light: the "conditions of light on the Via Emilia" in Gianni Celati's story by that title; the "melancholy, beautiful" light of a rainy September day in Francesca Sanvitale's "The Electric Typewriter"; the magical Ligurian light in Anna Maria Ortese's "On the Neverending Terrace"; the light of burning embers in Primo Levi's "The Witch-Doctors." This scintillating addition to contemporary fiction collections is highly recommended.
- Marcia Welsh, Guilford Free Lib., Ct.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.