THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ITALIAN SHORT STORIES

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THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ITALIAN SHORT STORIES

Name: THE PENGUIN BOOK OF ITALIAN SHORT STORIES
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
ISBN: 978-0-241-29983-8

edited by Jhumpa Lahiri ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 10, 2019

Remarkable stories from a wide range of writers describe the mundane and the fantastic, the everyday and the sublime.

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An anthology of 20th-century Italian literature.

Thanks largely to Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels, Italian literature has been experiencing a kind of renaissance in the United States. That makes this a propitious time for the release of a new anthology, edited by Lahiri (In Other Words, 2016, etc.), of Italian short stories in translation. Some of the names included here, like Primo Levi and Italo Calvino, will be familiar to American readers; others, like Elio Vittorini and Leonardo Sciascia, may be less so. In Levi’s “Quaestio de Centauris,” a centaur falls desperately in love with a human girl. In Sciascia’s “The Long Voyage,” a group of Sicilians pay 250,000 lire each to be ferried to America and are surprised to find themselves, in the end, somewhere else. In her introduction, Lahiri explains her criteria for the selections included here: She wanted “a wealth of styles, and a range of voices,” and no living authors (nothing by Ferrante here). She’s also made a concerted effort to include stories written by women. Writers like Elsa Morante and Natalia Ginzburg, whose books have recently been reissued in English, have been receiving increased attention; their stories, here, are a delight to read. There’s also a wonderful story, “Generous Wine,” by Italo Svevo, in which a man who has been ordered by his doctor to diet and abstain from drinking goes to a wedding and partakes, liberally, of everything. “I ate and drank,” he says, “not out of hunger or thirst but out of eagerness for freedom. Each bite, each sip, had to be a declaration of independence.” Later, of course, he’s filled with regret. Taken one by one, each story in this volume is a jewel. Taken all together, the book is a remarkable introduction to Italian literature and a great gift to the English-speaking reader.

Remarkable stories from a wide range of writers describe the mundane and the fantastic, the everyday and the sublime.

Pub Date: Sept. 10, 2019

ISBN: 978-0-241-29983-8

Page Count: 528

Publisher: Penguin

Review Posted Online: June 16, 2019

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2019

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ROMAN STORIES
by Jhumpa Lahiri ; translated by Jhumpa Lahiri with Todd Portnowitz

- BOOK REVIEW
TRANSLATING MYSELF AND OTHERS
by Jhumpa Lahiri

- BOOK REVIEW
TRUST
by Domenico Starnone ; translated by Jhumpa Lahiri

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THE HANDMAID'S TALE

by Margaret Atwood ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 17, 1985

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

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The time is the not-so-distant future, when the US's spiraling social freedoms have finally called down a reaction, an Iranian-style repressive "monotheocracy" calling itself the Republic of Gilead—a Bible-thumping, racist, capital-punishing, and misogynistic rule that would do away with pleasure altogether were it not for one thing: that the Gileadan women, pure and true (as opposed to all the nonbelieving women, those who've ever been adulterous or married more than once), are found rarely fertile.

Thus are drafted a whole class of "handmaids," whose function is to bear the children of the elite, to be fecund or else (else being certain death, sent out to be toxic-waste removers on outlying islands). The narrative frame for Atwood's dystopian vision is the hopeless private testimony of one of these surrogate mothers, Offred ("of" plus the name of her male protector). Lying cradled by the body of the barren wife, being meanwhile serviced by the husband, Offred's "ceremony" must be successful—if she does not want to join the ranks of the other disappeared (which include her mother, her husband—dead—and small daughter, all taken away during the years of revolt). One Of her only human conduits is a gradually developing affair with her master's chauffeur—something that's balanced more than offset, though, by the master's hypocritically un-Puritan use of her as a kind of B-girl at private parties held by the ruling men in a spirit of nostalgia and lust. This latter relationship, edging into real need (the master's), is very effectively done; it highlights the handmaid's (read Everywoman's) eternal exploitation, profane or sacred ("We are two-legged wombs, that's all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices"). Atwood, to her credit, creates a chillingly specific, imaginable night-mare. The book is short on characterization—this is Atwood, never a warm writer, at her steeliest—and long on cynicism—it's got none of the human credibility of a work such as Walker Percy's Love In The Ruins. But the scariness is visceral, a world that's like a dangerous and even fatal grid, an electrified fence.

Tinny perhaps, but still a minutely rendered and impressively steady feminist vision of apocalypse.

Pub Date: Feb. 17, 1985

ISBN: 038549081X

Page Count: -

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin

Review Posted Online: Sept. 16, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 1985

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
FOURTEEN DAYS
edited by Margaret Atwood & Douglas Preston

- BOOK REVIEW
OLD BABES IN THE WOOD
by Margaret Atwood

- BOOK REVIEW
BURNING QUESTIONS
by Margaret Atwood

- PERSPECTIVES
Appreciations: Margaret Atwood’s Novel The Handmaid’s Tale Turns 30

- SEEN & HEARD
Nan A. Talese, Legendary Publisher, Is Retiring

- BOOK TO SCREEN
Teasers Drop for ‘Shadow and Bone,’ Other Films

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.