The Man from Pico

...Without sociology, without the New Yorker simper ("I don't know why I'm here, really, but I seem to have this note pinned to my bathrobe"), Landolfi tells us that this is, simply, the way things are, not in reality, but in the discrepancy between that reality and the reciting consciousness...

...Raymond Rosenthal, one of the book's three excellent translators, evidently had the task of filling out the collection, which must have been rather like putting the milk under the cream in an unhomogenized bottle...

...Surely this was too quintessentially Gogol to have been written by him: only parody can supply every element of a writer's style at once...

...Yet these are not the qualities which afford the elusive Landolfi-who refuses to be photographed and admits only that he was born in Pico in 1908 and that he has studied and translated Russian literaturehis 19th-century Stimmung, any more than his freedom to employ all our bodily functions as emblems of conduct, his control of narrative structure by imagery, and his use of a peristaltic interior monologue make him into what we think of as a characteristic modern...

...Reviewed by RICHARD HOWARD Contributor, "Poetry," "Partisan Review" When a hooked poet first read me "Gogol's Wife" a few years ago, I suspected-though the source was Encounter and the sensibility overacute for the tone-that I had somehow missed one of the gifted epigones of the Russian master...

...His tone, as I have said, is generally that of parody or ventriloquism...

...Literally, it is the stomach that speaks while the lips compose themselves into a stylized grimace...

...Reading Tommaso Landolfi's other stories in this modest, ninepiece collection, arbitrarily chosen, it would seem-two long stories, some récits and a prose poem-I had the impression that several genres of European literature and the minor works of several authors (Maupassant and Kleist, especially) had been rustled up from some library limbo to appall our easy assurance that we have learned so much about storytelling since the death of Henry James...

...More important, though, is that he has somehow found a way to tell his stories, to recite his pieces with an unquestioning, unquestionable thereness, a "finish" in both senses of the word, as if all our excuses for saying (think of Salinger's preposterous rationalizations for writing at all) what we have to say were no more than evidences of a guilty conscience...

...Of course, Landolfi's themes of obsession, enigma, sacrilege andin the long diary of a mad scientist, "Cancroregina," published in an old Botteghe Oscure-cosmological irony are as darkly gothic as any graduate student could wish...

...I am trying not to tell, or even summarize, the stories of Tommaso Landolfi, for it is his telling of them, his innocence (as opposed to our bad faith) as a "réciter" that prove Landolfi to be particular and particularly valuable...

...Our storytellers today seek to prove that they have a reason for raising their voice, or to substract themselves from the voice before it is raised...

...Not that Landolfi fails to be original, or fails to suggest 20th-century analogues (particularly Borges -himself a freak in our, in any literature...

...Perhaps, I thought at the time, there exists a further body of work, fables of wild humor and grave disgust, that were now to be translated into English...

...Perhaps the arresting, often surrealistic tone which is never merely assertive reminds me most-to give a last hint of what Landolfi is like without trying to retell him-of the echo we hear in the first voice in our modern literature, the voice Montaigne invented to be private with in public: "The others form man, I recite him," and "I do not instruct, I recount...

...Of course Maupassant, whose influence might account for "Pastoral" in this collection and even for the gynecological parts of "The Death of the King of France," would have hesitated to try the toilet-straining sequences that open the Landolfi story...

...And Kleist, whose bleak tales suggest that logic of correspondences which Landolfi has also mastered ("Wedding Night"), is infinitely more reserved in his administration of corroborative detail...

...Now, abruptly, without a genealogy, but with an exemplary otherness, here is a man from Pico who has been publishing since 1937 an oeuvre which now amounts to nearly a dozen volumes (and how I should like to have that imaginary diary with the gambler's title, Rien Va...