| Title | : | Italian Tales: An Anthology of Contemporary Italian Fiction (Italian Literature and Thought) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 030012371X |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9780300123715 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 296 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2004 |
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 Literature and Thought) Reviews
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Published in 2004, this collection of 18 short stories and excerpts from novels features post-modernist Italian writers who are contemporaries of two Italian writers well-known in the US: Italo Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night A Traveler; Invisible Cities) and Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose; Focault’s Pendulum) although works by those two authors are not included. Some stories are essays, travelogues or memoirs. Four are by women authors.
The editor, a professor of Italian Studies at Brown University, gives us a general introduction to modern Italian literature and a page a two before each story which provides a bit of background about the story and the author.
A sample of the stories:
Consuming the View by Luigi Malerba is a fantasy about the corrosive gaze of Japanese, American and German tourists literally eroding the panoramic vista of Rome from a hillside.
Zardino by Sebastiano Vassalli is a selection from a historical novel focused on a tiny village in the Po Valley and how it changed with modernization. But human nature doesn’t change and the gossips “…wove an inextricable web of lies and half-truths, a delirium of words with everyone against his neighbor…” In the barnyard “…human hatred became refined and exalted, attaining the utmost peaks of achievement … hatred at its purest – abstract, bodiless, entirely impartial…”
Gianni Celati gives us Lost Road, an excerpt from a non-fiction travelogue about how the landscape of the Po Valley is changing with the impact of urbanization. “The landlady of the café-hotel asked me if I’d slept well, with a smile which I read as a pucker of loneliness.” Of a woman on a bus: “…she was staring at me without staring, as if she were looking at something in the air around me.”
We have an analogy of life with a solo pilot, a man who can’t read his instruments, lost in fog. This is Daniele Del Giudice’s story Reaching Dew Point.
On the Neverending Terrace by Anna Maria Ortese is an old-fashioned spooky-house ghost/poltergeist story.
Another excerpt from a historical novel is from The Sea Voyage of Baron Mandralisca by Vincenzo Consolo. The selection talks of the pumice stone miners on a tiny island north of Sicily. “There a vast army of men, a black swarm of tarantulas and beetles, labors under a sun as fierce as that of Morocco, cutting into the porous rock with their pickaxes. Bent double under their baskets, they emerge from holes, caves, galleries in the rock; they slither and slide along narrow planks, bridges stretching into the sea, toward the boats.” By age 40 their lungs are eaten up with “stone disease.” Doctors can do nothing for them, so they make a pilgrimage to the Black Madonna of Tindari to pray for a miracle.
And yet another excerpt from a historical novel that even blends in a little opera: Pier Maria Pasinetti in Melodrama, compares two vastly different events concurrent in time (1849) but separated by culture and thousands of miles of distance: The California gold rush and the Austrian-Venetian wars and Venice Revolution.
Various quotes I liked from the editor’s sections:
Definition of history by Elsa Morante: “…a scandal that lasted for ten thousand years.”
About writers by Giorgio Manganelli: “…some of whom lie but don’t know they are lying, others lie knowingly, others search for the truth knowing they can’t find it, others believe they have found it, and still others believed they had found it but are beginning to have doubts.”
Lalla Romano writes of her book “[It] is not a journey in time to retrieve the past; it is a short journey in space to the home village [where] the past is eternally present.”
Erri De Luca says his native Neapolitan “fills your mouth with spit to stick the words together.” And “The day is a morsel…One bite and it’s gone, so let’s get busy.”
Vincenzo Consolo writes: “Vertical writers are people like us [Sicilians], like the Neapolitans or the South Americans…the greater the social unhappiness of a country the more its writers are made ‘vertical,’ by a need to explain their own pain and to understand its origins.”
Although all the authors in this volume are translated from modern Italian, the editor in his introduction gives us a bit of fascinating history of the Italian language. Prior to the unification of the Italian city states around the 1860’s, what we consider “Italian” today was primarily a written language used mainly in northern Italy and spoken only by the elite. Little by little it has gained currency over the regional dialects that are almost separate languages. We are told, for example, that formal Italian has separate words for sleep and dream but Neapolitan only one, suonno: “For us they are the same thing.”
Even in 2002 a survey showed that 44% of Italians still do not speak formal Italian at home, although about 75% CAN speak it because they report using it outside the home with strangers. Southern Italy, especially Naples and Sicily, has the most persistent use of regional dialect.
Many good stories, 3.5 rounded up to 4.
Top photo: Rome vista by Corrado Matteoni on flickr.com
Middle photo: abandoned pumice factories by Michael Sheehan on hiveminer.com
Photo of the author from vivo.brown.edu -
3 1/2 stars
There are some wonderful authors and some very fine writing to be discovered in this anthology (Anna Maria Ortese, where have you been all my life?), but an emphasis on brief excerpts from novels rather than short stories or novellas makes reading this a bit frustrating and unfulfilling.
On a side note, the cover of my edition is grotesque and misleading, in no way reflective of the content of the book (which is mostly thoughtful, gently melancholy or intellectually rigorous, and decidedly unsexy). What on earth was the publisher thinking?!? -
I really struggled with these stories. What had started as me being interested in Italian fiction, it simply felt dull and boring. Almost like instead of writing with intent, most stories simply felt as stating, blandly or way too forcefully, what was happening or what was being spoken. In so many stories there was near mindless rambling. The only section that I genuinely enjoyed was about memories and they were all written by female authors. They were the ones that pulled you in, messed up your perception on space in a hunted house, or poured out the sentimentality of childhood confusion entwined with nostalgia.
And then the next segment started and I got bored. Needless to say, I struggled till the end where it began to pick up just a little, until, five years later, I have finally finished this anthology. And will not pick it up again. -
Provincial anthologies explore the core of the distinct civilization, unveiling its exceptional literary gems with sincere and concealed attributes of greatness. This string of collection includes monographs, critically acclaimed publications, citations and general canonical works of 18 eminent Italian writers. Majority of the fictional pieces were scripted during1970-1990s; a remarkable era in the Italian political and social vista. From the late 1970s the Italians faced many political upheavals with the onset of mass terrorism to the economical affluence in the 1980s and the national public turmoil of the 1990s. The writings in this volume were chiefly prepared under this contemporary metamorphism; as a result several stories describe the sensitivity to nostalgia, nothingness, a search for robust dwelling and quandary to fit into two diverse worlds.
The anthologies are sectioned into four categories in accordance to the reactions that various writings emote.
1)Ruins with a View:- includes four short stories depicting sense of nothingness, stupor and chaos without a suitable outlet.
2)Memory Lanes:- scriptures in this section deposits nostalgia, a yearning to go back in history where world was much soother and uncomplicated.
3)Vanishing Points:- a resistance to let go of the past and embrace the present. A reluctant clash of accommodating and existing in the modern world.
4)Views from Afar:- Fading of historical memories and challenging the simplistic sense of what is the past and the perception of its secret link to the present.
Since the compilation mainly consists of excerpts from various authored books, it turns out to be a tad tricky for readers who are not familiar with works of the highlighted novelists. It is not folklore or short anecdotes of Italian fiction, but an appreciative endeavor of the literary art and connotation of the changing Italian landscape in the modern and post-modern era. -
An average anthology, with too many novel excerpts, and with introductions that are too academic for my taste. For me, the best discoveries otherwise available in English translation were Paola Capriolo and Erri De Luca.
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I'd give this 2.5 stars. Obviously, some stories were more interesting than others. Not a bad introduction to contemporary Italian fiction.
