Three Italian Novellas

...The approach, however, is not the same...

...The Window is an out-and-out "chase" a la Alfred Hitchcock...

...We gain entree through the good offices of an old Commendatore, a now retired but once internationally famous impresario, who presumably recounts to Soldati various incidents in his long and eventful life...

...Functioning in the first two novellas as a sort of father confessor to whom the protagonists reveal their secret distress, the Commendatore plays the dual role of actor and confessor in the third...

...In The Father of the Orphans, he penetrates the hypocrisy of a former director of La Scala—esthete, hedonist and erotomaniac—who turns his back on a life "devoted to his work and his exceedingly private pleasures" to direct, with all the impressive outward trappings of Franciscan abnegation, an asylum for war orphans...

...These stories have a sort of patina that one associates with the works of Somerset Maugham...

...Reviewed by H?l?ne Cantarella Former chief, Foreign Language Review Section, OWl Motion Picture Bureau Mario Soldati is a man of parts who has tried his hand with remarkable success in many fields...

...Well known in Italy as a motion-picture director, novelist, radio lecturer and art critic, he makes his American literary debut with a volume of three urbane and skilful novellas which might be called variations on a common theme of human deviousness...

...Gino Petrucci, a mediocre Italian painter beloved of many women, vanishes one day through the window of his English fiancee's London flat...

...In The Green Jacket, he helps a famous conductor uncover the motives which impelled him to perpetrate a cruel hoax on a rather simple-minded tympanist who had fatuously posed as a noted composer while both were hiding from the Nazis in a monastery during the war...

...Soldati looks at situations and characters almost obliquely and, from this vantage point, highlights attitudes, singularities, obsessions or perversities which become important to the reader as clues to inner springs of conduct...

...We are here far removed from the sturdy but perplexed peasants of Silone, the poor, proud, complex Florentines of Pratolini, the tormented characters of Vittorini...

...How she and the Commendatore, who also loved her, discover twenty years later what had happened to this fickle scamp is unfolded in an exciting story which shows the directorial flair that Soldati displayed to such advantage in his film Flight to France...

...The translation by Gwyn Morris and Henry Furst is excellent...

...The world into which Soldati ushers us is the smart, superficial, sophisticated society of the opera...

...This arresting and almost visual technique (which derives not a little from the movies), combined with a marvelously fluid style and a superlative gift for story-telling, results in a collection of unusual and eminently readable tales...