Paradiso by Michele Masneri

 

Paradiso

by Michele Masneri

Il Custode by Niccolò Ammaniti

 

Il Custode 

by Niccolò Ammaniti

L'Orto Americano by Pupi Avati

 

L'Orto Americano

by Pupi Avati

"Almanacco dell'Orrore Popolare: Folk horror e immaginario italiano" Edited by Fabio Camilletti and Fabrizio Foni

 

Almanacco dell'Orrore Popolare 

Folk horror e immaginario italiano

Edited by Fabio Camilletti and Fabrizio Foni

L'Archivio del Diavolo by Pupi Avati

 

L'Archivio del Diavolo

by Pupi Avati

The Bishop's Bedroom by Piero Chiara

The Bishop's Bedroom

by Piero Chiara

Translated by Jill Foulston

Fjura tas-Sabbara, Fjura tax-Xadina by Irene Chias

Fjura tas-Sabbara, Fjura tax-Xadina

by Irene Chias

Translated into Maltese by Mark Vella

Dandelions by Thea Lenarduzzi

Dandelions

by Thea Lenarduzzi

Assassinio a Villa Borghese by Walter Veltroni

 

Assassinio a Villa Borghese

by Walter Veltroni

Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio by Amara Lakhous

Clash of Civilisations Over 

an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio

by Amara Lakhous

Translated by Ann Goldstein

Tell Me About It by Sacha Naspini

 

Tell Me About It

by Sacha Naspini

(Translated from the Italian by Clarissa Botsford)

Leggende e Credenze delle Alpi Piemontesi by Enrico Bertone

 

Leggende e Credenze delle Alpi Piemontesi:

Storie di Demoni e di Santi, di Despoti e di Amanti, 

di Belve e di Spiriti

by Enrico Bertone

La Bellezza della Nuova Musica by Emanuele Arciuli

 

La Bellezza della Nuova Musica

by Emanuele Arciuli

Trust by Domenico Starnone

Trust

by Domenico Starnone

translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

"From Another World" by Evelina Santangelo

 From Another World

by Evelina Santangelo

translated from the Italian by Ruth Clarke

 

Elizabeth Mac Donald: A Matter of Interpretation

 A Matter of Interpretation 

by Elizabeth Mac Donald

A Musical Review

The Third Tower by Antal Szerb: A review of the Pushkin Collection edition

The Third Tower - Journeys in Italy 

by Antal Szerb (translated by Len Rix)

A review of the Pushkin Collection edition

Vacanze italiane : Antal Szerb's "Journey by Moonlight"

An Italian Honeymoon - Antal Szerb's "Journey by Moonlight"

On honeymoon in Italy, Mihály chooses a solitary nocturnal ramble in the back alleys of Venice over the pleasures of the bridal bed. It doesn’t take a psychology guru to realise that the marriage is not off to the best of starts. His wife Erszi knows that, this being her dreamy and eccentric Mihály (rather than her practical first husband Zoltán), the explanation for his erratic behaviour is most likely complex and slightly illogical. And that’s exactly what it turns out to be. 

After a (not so) chance encounter with an old acquaintance - János Szepetneki – Mihály decides to recount to Erszi his obsessive youthful friendship with siblings Tamás and Éva Ulpius, to whose “ring” he belonged together with said János and the ascetic Ervin. Oiled by a bottle of Italian wine, and egged on by Erszi’s insistent questions, Mihály implicitly reveals (despite his protestation to the contrary) that his relationship with Tamás and Éva had strong erotic overtones and that this might have something to do with his strange and evident discomfiture with the marital state. What is certainly clear is that Tamás’s eventual tragic death left a long-term mark on the close coterie of friends.

This long “psychoanalytic” session reminded me of a very different novel – Murakami’s Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage . And, like Murakami’s, this novel does develop into a “pilgrimage” of sorts - its first part ends with Mihály, not altogether innocently, contriving to catch a wrong train and separating himself from Erszi. In the subsequent parts of the book, we follow Mihály as, against the backdrop of an Italy exotic, magical, seductive and frightening, he tries to recapture the decadent aura of his youth.

Antal Szerb’s 1937 “Journey by Moonlight” (or, to give its title in its literal translation, “Traveller and the Moonlight”) is one of the best-known of modern Hungarian novels. It certainly deserves to be much better appreciated outside Szerb’s native country. Like all great classics, it is a multilayered work which lends itself to a variety of readings. It is, in its own weird way, a comedy of manners, with a streak of playfully sardonic humour always bubbling just beneath the surface. It is also a novel of “magical realism” written before the term was invented. It is an exploration of pre-World War II society – indeed, at its most obvious and superficial level, it presents to us a cast of characters who are all trying, unsuccessfully, to escape the bourgeoisie they find so suffocating. 

But, as translator Peter Czipott points out in the insightful afterword to this Alma Classics edition, a major theme in the novel is Szerb’s exploration of “nostalgia”. What Mihály is after are the dreams and ideals of his youth, now sadly replaced by humdrum, everyday life. But is it at all possible to go back in time? At one point towards the end, one character warns another not to try to live “someone else’s life”. But, the novel seems to be telling us, our youthful selves are as distant from us as “someone else”.

Szerb was not primarily a novelist, but a literary scholar who published respected works on the history of Hungarian and world literature. He lived for a time in Italy – his descriptions of the country are partly autobiographical but, in a quasi-postmodern twist, they also (knowingly) reflect common literary portrayals of the Bel Paese which Szerb knew so well through his studies. Indeed, one cannot help feeling that this is not the Italy of the Italians, or even that of the Rough Guides and Lonely Planet. This is, by turns, the darkly fascinating and haunting Italy of the Continental Gothic novels, the decadent Italy of fin-de-siecle writers (Mann’s Death in Venice comes to mind), Goethe’s sun-washed Land, wo die Zitronen blühn...

Journey by Moonlight might not always be an easy read, but it certainly is one which repays the effort and which is likely to reveal new depths if revisited. This Alma Classics edition is highly recommended, not only for its fluent translation, but also for its useful explanatory notes.

This edition published February 24th 2016 by Alma Classics (first published 1937 as Utas és holdvilág)

***

What music to go with this novel?  Two suggestions:

Elisabeth Grummer sings "Kennst du das Land...", a Goethe setting from the opera Mignon, by Ambroise Thomas

And then, of course, some decadent Mahler, now forever linked with the haunting images of Visconti's Death in Venice:

Dino Buzzati's twilight zone

"I Misteri d'Italia"

Dino Buzzati's twilight zone... 

It seems to me, fantasy should be as close as possible to journalism. The right word is not "banalizing", although in fact a little of this is involved. Rather, I mean that the effectiveness of a fantastic story will depend on its being told in the most simple and practical terms

Italian author Dino Buzzati is best-known for his existentialist novel “The Tartar Steppe” and for his short stories which skirt the genres of horror, fantasy, science-fiction and what we would today call “magical realism”. Buzzati was also a journalist for Corriere della Sera. In 1965 this newspaper commissioned him as ‘special correspondent’ to research a series about paranormal phenomena in Italy. The fantastical was part and parcel of his fiction and he dedicated himself to this assignment with gusto, traversing the Bel Paese to meet a motley crew of mediums, visionaries, mystics, witches and folk healers. 

In 1978, these pieces, alongside other works by Buzzati in the same vein, were  published in book form as “Misteri d’Italia” or Mysteries of Italy. They certainly form an intriguing collection. On the one hand, Buzzati is an involved narrator, personally participating in spiritualist sessions and exorcisms, and staying up to hunt ghosts in his childhood home. Being the novelist that he is, he can also conjure a chilling atmosphere or convey a character with the slightest of means. On the other hand, Buzzati adopts an objective stance, neither compelling us to believe the otherwordly events he describes nor dismissing outright the possibility of the existence of the supernatural. If at all, a trace of scepticism can only be felt in the occasional subtle irony or burst of dark humour. The words Buzzati reserves for his friend (and would-be occultist) Beonio Brocchieri could equally be applied to him:

Ha compiuto numerosi viaggi, tenendosi ugualmente lontano dai fanatici che interpretano ogni fenomeno come rivelazione di potenza sovraumana, quanto da coloro che vivono nel continuo terrore di "essere fatti fessi" e cio’ che esce dalle loro possibilita' di razionale comprensione lo eliminano tout court dicendo che sono tutte ciurmerie.

Reading this collection, one gets the impression that ultimately the truth or otherwise of the paranormal experiences described is not particularly relevant. What is more significant is the fact that there are people who choose to believe in such phenomena. For Buzzati this is intrinsically tied to a way of life which, even back in the 60s, was already slowly disappearing. Unsurprisingly, these pieces are shot through with a sense of nostalgia. Italy as the young Buzzati had known it was succumbing to modernity and its ghosts were, slowly but surely, being laid to rest.

Buzzati was also a painter.  This is his "Il Babau" from 1967 combining his penchant for surreal imagery and weird tales.