Disclaimers stated, I next have to state my admiration for the editor of The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories, Jhumpa Lahiri. First of all, it’s clear that she has an immense knowledge of and passion for Italian literature, given the depth and breadth of the selections. Lahiri’s editorial voice is also as illuminating as it is engaging. For instance, the introduction to the book discusses the way fascism attempted to control language in Italy, like through the rejection of words imported from the Spanish, in work for publication. Those historical details are interspersed throughout the prefatory remarks for each of the authors in the collection, which helps to weave a grander narrative around the individual pieces. Moreover, Lahiri’s introductions to the authors themselves are brief and, often, deeply engaging. She has a knack for highlighting the elements of the work in a way that compels me to read more of each authors’ works, even in situations where the selected story didn’t specifically touch me. The literary portraits are themselves rich works of literary biography worth reading.
There are more stories in the collection than would be worth counting for the review, but an early standout in the collection is Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa’s mythical story “The Siren.” Incidentally, there is a motif of mythical creatures throughout the collection, which also appear in Primo Levi’s “Quaestio de Centauris.” Some of the more magical and surreal stories stand out as the highlights of the collection. For instance, “And Yet They Are Knocking…” by Dino Buzzati was one of my favourites, in which an aristocratic family stays in their home amid rumours of a flood. One of the central characters gives away dog statues, which are then seen being claimed by someone the other character deems unworthy. While they discuss it, various servants enter to warn them of the rising water levels and they live in willful ignorance. It’s one of those stories that reads as a cautionary tale with rich allegorical layers, but with the added touch of the Kafkaesque. It was great, like a bizarre and suspenseful stage play or Kaufmann film.
Perhaps the strangest and most amusing story in the collection is Tommaso Landolfi’s “Gogol’s Wife.” The story centers the narrative on the historical literary figure Nikolai Gogol and focuses on his relationship with his wife, who, very unhistorically, is a balloon. Yes, you read that right. Gogol is married to a balloon, and Landolfi’s tone is completely deadpan. Every character just accepts that Gogol is married to a balloon, and when he gets mad he wants to deflate her, and the story builds towards a popping. It would be a narrative well-adapted into film by an art-house director. Everything about it was so weird and yet so human. It’s even funnier if you do some cursory research and find that Gogol was never married and that people have criticized his writing of women as being “impossibly virtuous” or witches, which adds to the rich absurdity of him being such a monster to his inflatable wife.
Beyond the strange, in many cases, Lahiri’s editorial choices tend toward stories of failed dreams and disappointed expectations, particularly when it comes to women and, even more specifically, their married lives. One especially moving story is “A Pair of Eyeglasses” by Anna Maria Ortese, which is about a girl needing glasses and her family spending an immense sum to cover her prescription. Everyone talks about the girl’s prospects being virtually nil—with glasses only making it worse. It’s a gorgeously written Bildungsroman that considers wealth and beauty and a loss of perspective, and it’s particularly powerful because Ortese’s style is replete with stunning imagery, especially following when the central character gets her glasses, which is such a lovely stylistic flare. I consistently appreciate when a writer immerses you in the experience of characters by playing with style, and this story is a masterful delivery.
Stories like “The Milliner” by Antonio Delfini and “My Husband” by Natalia Ginzburg explore the married life of women through a particularly depressing lens. In the former, a young girl with dreams of starting her own fashion house finds herself subject to the support and subsequent abandonment of Arturo. Her dreams of him bound to her ambitions, the ending of the story feels like a particularly sad state of affairs. Things don’t get much better for married life. In the story “My Husband”, the main character and her husband have a tepid relationship. She clings to him despite his continual lack of interest in her. He is particularly flat when expressing his affection for her, so while the words may be intended to express love, it comes across more like that song from My Fair Lady: “I’ve grown accustomed to her face.” However, the husband maintains an affair with another woman and is honest with his wife. As much as she tried to train him out of it, he returns to making love in the woods with his mistress and she becomes pregnant. The final pages of the story are a riveting climax. The husband, a doctor, is meant to deliver his mistress’ baby. Meanwhile, the wife is enlisted by the midwife to help. I am tempted not to spoil the ending, but it’s just too compelling: the mistress and child die during childbirth and the husband dies shortly after, leaving the wife on her own to go wheresoever she pleases. What makes Ginzburg’s story so powerful is the conflicted emotions and position of the wife at the end of the story. She discusses her pleasure at the death of the mistress and revels in it, and then when her husband dies she finds herself free but unable to think of where she wants to go. It’s a finely wrought psychological and emotional conclusion to a story that just feels me with depressing dread.
“Silence” by Aldo Palazzeschi is a similar depressing story of an increasingly misanthropic and reclusive man, who speaks less and less and, after the death of his father, hardly utters “yes” or “no.” We are aligned with his housekeeper, who puts in relentless effort to meet his particular needs and tastes. One day, Benedetto Vai begins returning home with packages—an unusual, rather an unheard of, gesture. Leonia feels a deep resentment, knowing that he must have spoken to someone about the price of his purchase. Having worked for him for years, “She felt tricked, deeply violated. And for the first time she felt like the victim of a madman. It had not been a deep-seated necessity arising from his nature and spirit that had led him to such extremes after all, but an intriguing experience, the caprice of a lazy man, a game conjured up by an empty mind, a joke in very bad taste” (166). The sense of betrayal that he could open his mouth for such a senseless purchase and not talk to her is a painful one. The irony, too, that a misanthrope purchases wine glasses, offers a particularly bitter sting. Benedetto Vai continues to buy ostentatious glasses and cutlery while succumbing to some kind of illness. He spends his days rearranging the cabinet and admiring it until he becomes bedridden. When he is about to die, Leonia performs a final act of service by setting the table with all of the glasses. Benedetto Vai stares at her and continues to glance towards the door and the story ends with an ethereal image: “Someone came in as lightly as mist, and so white as to be indistinguishable from the air. Only Benedetto Vai was able to make out the pale apparition that advanced from the door to the festively laid table which was being fixed for all eternity in those wide blue eyes” (170). There’s a lot in the story to grapple with, and Palazzeschi captures our internal contradictions nicely.
Some of the stories take a more surprising turn with respect to relationships. In particular, “The Other Side of the Moon” highlights a woman who has an affair with a gangster. They plan crime together and the life they plan seems so full of promise, but by the end of the story, she realizes that he’s no better than her husband and walks out on him. The ending provides a bizarre twist that highlights the impossibility of being in business with criminals.
The subtext of many of the pieces reflect the conflicted political history of Italy, as well. I think the best story in that respect is “Invitation to Dinner” by Alba de Céspedes. In that story, a decorated British diplomat comes to dinner with an Italian couple in the postwar period. It’s a story that highlights the dramatic tensions following World War II, where conflicted emotions surrounding the defeat of fascism and the resentment towards Britain’s self-appointed superiority exist in uneasy connection, which plays out at the micro level in the dinner party in a tense, seemingly prolonged meal. It is not a story that gives easy political answers; it is a story that recreates the discomfort and lets you sit in it, and I really liked that.
A number of the later stories in the collection deal with twist endings in various forms, “The Smell of Death” by Beppe Fenoglio and Antonio Delfini’s “The Milliner” among them. In both, there are surprising deaths that provide the climax with a dramatic force to punctuate the tale. “The Smell of Death” in particular establishes some rich imagery and symbolism for a fight between men and the disapproving spectator / love interest. There’s a wonderfully ominous quality to the story, but not without its own tenderness. The remorse Carlo feels after fighting Attilo seems to linger in the air—like the smell of death.
Speaking of the smell of death, Silvio D’Arzo’s story “Elegy for Signora Nodier” is a pretty strange little tale that highlights a taxidermied dog that was the beloved’s when he was alive. There’s a sort of amicable-seeming love triangle, but by the end of the story there’s a dognapping, (not a dog napping), and years later the dog appears embalmed in one of the women’s apartments. It’s a bizarre story where I found myself reading the end several times just to let it marinate. I quite liked it.
Beyond these, a number of the stories were quite enjoyable. For instance, there is a selection of vignettes by Giorgio Manganelli that would be interesting to explore further: his book is called Centuria: One Hundred Ouroboric Novels [how great is that title!]. As I’ve mentioned, Lahiri really knows how to sell works. There were a number of other stories worth reading that haven’t made it into this review—and I fear I haven’t done the collection justice anyhow—but I can’t help but feel that my experience would be much improved by reading full collections of these authors’ works. You don’t realize how powerfully adapting to a writer’s voice can improve your experience of their work overall until you find them presented in rapid succession, longing for more time to connect with them before moving on.
In any case, if you’re in the market for short stories, I think The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories has a lot to offer. I imagine the collection is curated with university courses in mind. It addresses a number of the major touchstones of literary criticism; you’ll find stories that connect directly to feminism, new historicism, postmodernism, psychoanalysis, politics, and more. As different as the stories can be, there nonetheless remain those subterranean threads that compel us to find the connections that link a tradition together. Lahiri has seen them, and hopefully she’ll make you see them too.
Happy reading!
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