“Gentlemen! I am the author of a short story entitled ‘The Walk,’ which heralds my equally short collection, Impossible Stories, published by the fellows over a Vallecchi Publishers.”
“So who cares!”
“A rude yet, we must admit, frank opinion. But hold on, gentlemen: either I am deceiving myself, or the matter in which I propose to engage you is, as the saying goes today, of general interest.”
“We hope you’re not deceiving yourself.”
“Judge for yourselves. So then, a number of obsolete or difficult words appear in this story.”
“Good for you, but why?”
“It will soon become clear.”
Tommaso Landolfi, from Personaphilogical Dramatic Conference With Implications
Today’s selection is as close as covering all the criteria of being a “lost” book as any other I will cover this month. This is because of a myriad of factors, not the least of which is the author’s reputation as being an elitist, or as Italo Calvino mentions in his foreword, a writer’s writer.
I think it is safe to say that if anyone can understand the misfortune of being dubbed a “writer’s writer” it would be Italo Calvino. Thus it is with great energy that Calvino defends Landolfi as being funny, accessible and unpretentious.
Back to that criteria though, before I wind up writing everything in the introduction.
There have been two English language translations of Landolfi’s short fiction. One of them, Gogol’s Wife and Other Stories (New Directions) is still in print. Many of the stories in the collection I list today are contained in the New Directions edition. Many are not though, and neither is the wonderful Introduction by Calvino.
Two novels have been translated as well. Both of them are out-of-print. Landolfi was also a brilliant translator and literary critic. His criticism, as well as his autobiographical writings, come to life as works of implied importance in Calvino’s introduction but implication is as far as they go. Alas, they are not and never were available to English language readers.
Do not look at my insistence on the translation of works as a form of laziness. I would like to learn the language of Baudelaire and Dante, but in the end I am limited by time, let alone the fact that I have yet to reach any sort of mastery with the English language. I think most readers identify with this situation.
Now to the matter at hand. The below image was ripped from an eBay listing. Google images did not have one of the 1986 trade paperback. Cue foreboding music.
Words In Commotion and Other Stories by Tommaso Landolfi. Introduction by Italo Calvino. Translated and Edited by Katherine Jason. Originally issued by Viking in 1986, the work is out-of-print. Buy Landolfi here and support the Devil's Accountant.
“Still, upon closer consideration, how could he induce her to manifest herself less exclusively, to lead her toward corporeality? The notary realized full well that in such a situation the only means at his disposal were psychic ones; so each time he was kissed, he began to concentrate, to project his will and energy, as if to force himself to intercept some of the illusive creature’s particles, her fluid or substance; all together, those particles should have added up to some sort of being. That was followed by another step which generally was intended to evoke and urge on the darkness. And whether this was indeed the right method or there were other reasons, before long he began to reap the fruits of his labors.”
-Tommaso Landolfi, The Kiss
It is cliché to “expect the unexpected” but that is the reader’s lot when confronted by a tale of Landolfi’s fashioning. Every tale has its twist, always for the worst, and once warped the story is designed to evoke feelings of dread, disgust and above all, mirth.
The adept reader will glean much from the titles of the original collections in which these stories were issued: Fantastic Stories, Obsessive Stories, Dialogues, Horrific Stories, Between Autobiography and Invention, Love and Nothingness, Little Treatises, and lastly, Words and Writing (as close as nonfiction as Landolfi comes in the English language).
Before we get to the meat, I'd like to offer up a single appetizer. Calvino, in his introduction, explains to us that Landolfi was an incessant gambler. Late nights going into early mornings were spent at casinos. He was there so often that Calvino, hoping to talk literature with the great man, would have to endure the long gambling sessions in order to capture a few literary riffs by Landolfi.
Appetites should now be sufficiently whetted.
Landolfi is most often compared to Kafka. The Italian Kafka, or some such appellation meant to inspire authorial brand-awareness falls terribly short. He is nothing at all like Kafka, whose stories were much more densely written and whose literary milieu was one of what I like to call situational implication. Even Kafka’s humor is inadvertently rendered, though intentionally placed.
In Landolfi’s case, it is a matter of brutality. He is unflinching in his dreadful machinations, leading the reader to almost walk hand in hand with him as he tells us dirty, impossible tales with a glint of sarcasm shining on every barbed joke. I suppose the connection between the two writers is the use of magical realism to provide existential situation versus a grand theme. As far as what I mean by grand theme, think Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children or Marquez’s One-Hundred Year’s Of Solitude.
The difference is elemental. On the timeline of literary development the fantastical situation precedes fantasy as theme. It is the difference between the brief didacticism of the fable and the lurid romance of the fantasy. Both contain magical or unreal situations (talking monkeys, impervious warriors and unnatural curses) but the fable stops there. A true work of fantasy (its precursors exist in western knight-errant romances and eastern divine epics) develops a fully rendered (or as fully as is possible) world beyond the moment of unreality.
It is thus that when you pick up a Harcourt edition of Calvino you will see the proclamation that he was, “One of the world’s foremost fabulists,” or something very close to that. His tales utilized the fantastic as situation, not theme. Thus it is with Landolfi.
So the shared connection, in my opinion, is one of both Kafka and Landolfi essentially being fabulists. Past that I am not willing to sign on.
Landolfi’s short stories have a certain horror genre or even science fiction feel to them. In the story Chicken Fate, Landolfi gives us two farmers whose roles are reversed with their livestock. The writer’s delivery of the tale is reminiscent of a Twilight Zone episode. The original episodes, mind you. Also he wrote these stories before that series came on the scene.
In fact Landolfi’s macabre and fantastic stories are truly groundbreaking. Taking a hint from the Russian imagination, his tales are yet more modern than the occasional piece of fantasy written by brooding Russian masters. Landolfi essentially predicts the need for suspension, or “lightness” as Calvino termed it in his Six Memos For The Next Millenium, in modern writing. Tomaso Landolfi doesn’t want to rub our hands with the ichor of modern predicaments, but instead grant us a cynic’s view from above. It provides the reader with both a necessary warning and a conveniently borrowed righteousness.
I highly recommend you pick up some Landolfi. Either in the New Directions edition here or at your local bookstore or the OOP edition with the Calvino introduction via ABE. His light style and precise prose will, if nothing else, allow for a fun and disturbing night or two.
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