A Music Behind the Wall, Selected Stories, Volume Two
SKU:
1569
$22.00
$22.00
per item
Clothbound, sewn, jacketed, 224 pages, 5.5 x 8.5", 1998, 978-0-929701-56-1
Translated from the Italian by Henry Martin.
To enter Anna Maria Ortese's short stories is to surrender to a strangely intimate voice and a disturbing vision of enchantment: a realm of the imagination just beyond the senses, yet grounded to life in all its complexity. Her deceptively forthright tales include a chance encounter with a 112-year-old pixie, a walk through Jesus and Mary's celestial flower garden, a midnight journey through the Milan train station, a haunting tale of forbidden love, a sea voyage to Tripoli, and the end of the world. Ortese intertwines elements of the fantastic with autobiography, imbues documentary realism with devastating undertones of social satire, and addresses personal griefs in apocalyptic dreams. Widely considered one of the most important Italian writers of the century, Ortese published, in addition to several major novels, seven fiction collections between 1937 and her death in 1998 at the age of 84. The ten stories in this second volume of brilliant English language translations by Henry Martin further demonstrate why critics compare her works of "magic realism" with Kafka and Poe, Hamsun, Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Translated from the Italian by Henry Martin.
To enter Anna Maria Ortese's short stories is to surrender to a strangely intimate voice and a disturbing vision of enchantment: a realm of the imagination just beyond the senses, yet grounded to life in all its complexity. Her deceptively forthright tales include a chance encounter with a 112-year-old pixie, a walk through Jesus and Mary's celestial flower garden, a midnight journey through the Milan train station, a haunting tale of forbidden love, a sea voyage to Tripoli, and the end of the world. Ortese intertwines elements of the fantastic with autobiography, imbues documentary realism with devastating undertones of social satire, and addresses personal griefs in apocalyptic dreams. Widely considered one of the most important Italian writers of the century, Ortese published, in addition to several major novels, seven fiction collections between 1937 and her death in 1998 at the age of 84. The ten stories in this second volume of brilliant English language translations by Henry Martin further demonstrate why critics compare her works of "magic realism" with Kafka and Poe, Hamsun, Borges and Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
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"Deliciously eerie, enigmatic, and resonant symbolic fictions. . . . Ortese's stories, written over more than a half-century of courageously sustained creative effort, are deftly declarative explorations of their author's own inquiring sensibility, packed with autobiographical details and observations and explicitly discursive reportage. . . . Enchanting stuff from a unique writer. If you like Borges, you'll like Ortese." — Kirkus Reviews
"The roster of contemporary Italian fantasists available in translation for an English-speaking audience is a short but superior one. At the top reside Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, followed closely by Dino Buzzatti and Tommaso Landolfi. To this brief list must now be added the name of Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998). Although her long career in her native land began in the '30s, only recently have three volumes of her work become available in America: The Iguana , a novel, and A Music Behind the Wall, two volumes of short stories spanning her writing lifetime. Their late appearance here is a posthumous gift of great value to readers of imaginative literature -- all thanks must go to uncommonly skillful translator and editor Henry Martin — and these uncanny fictions should be warmly received.... Deploying simple settings and recurring symbols — railway stations, butterflies, snow, forests, islands, castles, drawings -- Ortese conjures up haunting psychological states of alienation felt by all but the least sensitive among us from time to time, her prose alternately lucid and darkling." — Washington Post Book World
"Ortese's teasingly opaque stories--which defy summary--derive rich, symbolic fantasy from such mundane subjects as a girl's wary idealization of her dispassionate father ('Slanting Eyes') and a writer's delight in her own ingenuity ('The Villa'). In her strongest works--such as the eerie family dramas 'Redskin' and 'Folletto in Genoa'--Ortese suggestively links her own determined 'persona' with the complex ordeal of a civilization traumatized by political instability and world war. The sense of struggle and urgencythat permeates these often discursive stories paradoxically suffuses themwith highly individual specificity and drama." — Bruce Allen, The News and Observer (Raleigh)
"The second volume of McPherson's edition of Ortese's short fiction in translation is only the third book of her work published in English in the U.S. It spans 50 years of work and includes fairy tales, memoirs, reportage, drawing-room tales framed like postmodern exercises--and little linear narrative. At her best, Ortese (who died in March 1998 at 84) uses startlingly beautiful and delicate language and magical situations to explore what she sees as the essential nature of existence (its strangeness), a Christian conception of grace, and the nature of representation and memory to create new meanings. Not character driven and often ambitiously circumlocutory, Ortese's fiction could be that of a less political Borges, but at its worst, the "strangeness" Ortese loves becomes tedious. Her own childhood and street scenes of Mussolini's Italy are most effectively rendered. Fans of Borges, of Garcia Marquez, even of Like Water for Chocolate, might find her work rewarding. Jennie Ver Steeg . . ." — ALA Booklist
"The protagonists of the nine stories collected here live in a harsh, unpredictable world made bearable by dreams and fantasies. Ortese's career, until her death last March, spanned six decades. Despite her literary prominence in her native Italy, she has gone untranslated in America, except for the first volume of her selected stories, and a novel, The Iguana (both published by McPherson). In these stories, Ortese exclusively employs the mostly unnamed first-person narrator, which lends her tales an intimate feel. In "Redskin," published in 1937 when when Ortese was in her 20s, the narrator plans with her older brother to build a sailing ship so the two can travel wherever they want. Her brother is called to war and is soon killed, but the narrator's imagination keeps his memory alive. The narrator of "The Villa," a writer who "wrote books full of wonderful stories, delicate and very pure, just the way [her mother] wanted," buys her mother a cottage in heaven where she can speak daily with a very casual Jesus and Mary, and where she is finally reunited with her dead son. Ortese's vigorous, detail-studded prose anchors the often surreal events her characters describe. The strong spiritual faith that permeates her writing is not so much religious as pantheistic. In the final piece, an essay called "Where Time is Another," Ortese shares the difficulties of her Neapolitan childhood (her formal education ended at age 13) and her life as a writer. Encouraging creativity in people, especially children, she argues from her own experience, helps them build a place "for freedom?the suspension of pain?for elegance, for tenderness." — Publishers Weekly (Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.)
"The roster of contemporary Italian fantasists available in translation for an English-speaking audience is a short but superior one. At the top reside Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, followed closely by Dino Buzzatti and Tommaso Landolfi. To this brief list must now be added the name of Anna Maria Ortese (1914-1998). Although her long career in her native land began in the '30s, only recently have three volumes of her work become available in America: The Iguana , a novel, and A Music Behind the Wall, two volumes of short stories spanning her writing lifetime. Their late appearance here is a posthumous gift of great value to readers of imaginative literature -- all thanks must go to uncommonly skillful translator and editor Henry Martin — and these uncanny fictions should be warmly received.... Deploying simple settings and recurring symbols — railway stations, butterflies, snow, forests, islands, castles, drawings -- Ortese conjures up haunting psychological states of alienation felt by all but the least sensitive among us from time to time, her prose alternately lucid and darkling." — Washington Post Book World
"Ortese's teasingly opaque stories--which defy summary--derive rich, symbolic fantasy from such mundane subjects as a girl's wary idealization of her dispassionate father ('Slanting Eyes') and a writer's delight in her own ingenuity ('The Villa'). In her strongest works--such as the eerie family dramas 'Redskin' and 'Folletto in Genoa'--Ortese suggestively links her own determined 'persona' with the complex ordeal of a civilization traumatized by political instability and world war. The sense of struggle and urgencythat permeates these often discursive stories paradoxically suffuses themwith highly individual specificity and drama." — Bruce Allen, The News and Observer (Raleigh)
"The second volume of McPherson's edition of Ortese's short fiction in translation is only the third book of her work published in English in the U.S. It spans 50 years of work and includes fairy tales, memoirs, reportage, drawing-room tales framed like postmodern exercises--and little linear narrative. At her best, Ortese (who died in March 1998 at 84) uses startlingly beautiful and delicate language and magical situations to explore what she sees as the essential nature of existence (its strangeness), a Christian conception of grace, and the nature of representation and memory to create new meanings. Not character driven and often ambitiously circumlocutory, Ortese's fiction could be that of a less political Borges, but at its worst, the "strangeness" Ortese loves becomes tedious. Her own childhood and street scenes of Mussolini's Italy are most effectively rendered. Fans of Borges, of Garcia Marquez, even of Like Water for Chocolate, might find her work rewarding. Jennie Ver Steeg . . ." — ALA Booklist
"The protagonists of the nine stories collected here live in a harsh, unpredictable world made bearable by dreams and fantasies. Ortese's career, until her death last March, spanned six decades. Despite her literary prominence in her native Italy, she has gone untranslated in America, except for the first volume of her selected stories, and a novel, The Iguana (both published by McPherson). In these stories, Ortese exclusively employs the mostly unnamed first-person narrator, which lends her tales an intimate feel. In "Redskin," published in 1937 when when Ortese was in her 20s, the narrator plans with her older brother to build a sailing ship so the two can travel wherever they want. Her brother is called to war and is soon killed, but the narrator's imagination keeps his memory alive. The narrator of "The Villa," a writer who "wrote books full of wonderful stories, delicate and very pure, just the way [her mother] wanted," buys her mother a cottage in heaven where she can speak daily with a very casual Jesus and Mary, and where she is finally reunited with her dead son. Ortese's vigorous, detail-studded prose anchors the often surreal events her characters describe. The strong spiritual faith that permeates her writing is not so much religious as pantheistic. In the final piece, an essay called "Where Time is Another," Ortese shares the difficulties of her Neapolitan childhood (her formal education ended at age 13) and her life as a writer. Encouraging creativity in people, especially children, she argues from her own experience, helps them build a place "for freedom?the suspension of pain?for elegance, for tenderness." — Publishers Weekly (Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.)