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Music Behind the Wall, v. 2 - Selected Stories (Hardcover)
Loot Price: R496
Discovery Miles 4 960
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Music Behind the Wall, v. 2 - Selected Stories (Hardcover)
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Loot Price R496
Discovery Miles 4 960
Expected to ship within 12 - 17 working days
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A follow-up collection (after 1994's Vol. I) of deliciously eerie,
enigmatic, and resonant symbolic fictions by the recently deceased
Italian author (The Iguana, 1984). 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. In them, the author frequently
presents herself as the writer dreaming imaginative responses to
crises (personal and global alike) that threaten the familial and
aesthetic values she cherishes. "Folletto in Genoa," for example,
presents a family transfigured by madness as a grotesque metaphor
for "the unification of Italy." In "Redskin," an introspective girl
contrives a fabulistic escape from the looming certainty of war and
a beloved brother's death in battle. "Fantasies" is an involuted
tale that reveals, in effect, how it was conceived and written; and
in "Nebel (A Lost Story)," Ortese confides to us, in medias res,
her uncertainty about how to develop her story. Her insistent
lushness and lyricism (beautifully served by Martin's graceful
translation) is memorably displayed in a sharply detailed "tour" of
Rome's Via Floria ("The Great A Street"), and particularly in a
celebratory portrayal of the rich variety of a writer's imagination
("The Villa"). And in the most Kafkaesque story here, "Slanting
Eyes," a young girl's "worship" of her remote father is expanded
into a darkly comic mock-biblical fantasy. Ortese is often
disarmingly funny ("on the subject of mountains, I have to say that
here there were no mountains"), and there's something very
attractive in her open espousal of the pleasure and healing power
inherent in literary artifice (a concluding autobiographical essay,
"Where Time is Another," ruminates engagingly on her passion for
"self-expression" among a family largely indifferent to it, and as
a citizen of a country that has suppressed it). Enchanting stuff,
from a unique writer. If you like Borges, you'll like Ortese.
(Kirkus Reviews)
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