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Music Behind the Wall, v. 1 - Selected Stories (Paperback)
Loot Price: R437
Discovery Miles 4 370
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Music Behind the Wall, v. 1 - Selected Stories (Paperback)
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Loot Price R437
Discovery Miles 4 370
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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Donate to Against Period Poverty
Total price: R457
Discovery Miles: 4 570
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This first volume of a planned two-volume collection could almost
serve as a primer on old-fashioned Italian short fiction. Ortese
(The Iguana, 1987) drifts from one dreamlike subject to the next in
these cerebral and enjoyable stories, most related in the same
educated, uninvolved first-person voice. The narrator of "The
Submerged Continent" describes a wealthy family from Naples with
three daughters who may or may not be real. "Torture" has no
characters per se, but it's a startlingly clinical examination of
romantic love and the havoc that it wreaks. In "Donat" the narrator
sits in a dingy room at six o'clock and dreams of seeing a man
named Donat in a bar at six o'clock, only to have Donat say that he
too has dreamed of seeing the narrator in the bar at six o'clock
some time in the future. "The Ombras" takes its name from a family
- whose surname means "shadow" - whom the narrator visits, only to
glimpse them gathered around the bed of a young girl with a black
and swollen body. In "The Tenant" the narrator's grandmother shares
her room with an angel named Mr. Lin, who eventually grows wings
and leaves. "Moonlight on the Wall" follows a pregnant woman who is
suddenly finding joy in "the mysterious beauty of being alive,"
even though she is convinced that few people appreciate her. "The
House in the Woods" is the lengthiest and least successful of these
stories. Its narrator lives with Trude, whom she describes as "the
bruised and swollen side of one's own soul," and there is an odd
incident with two men who are either plumbers or thieves or
something else altogether, but Ortese has played the same tricks in
a smaller space in the earlier pieces, so this time around they
seem elaborately elongated. Interesting, but with a strangeness
that sometimes becomes predictable. (Kirkus Reviews)
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