Tommaso Landolfi

Landolfi is a writer of rare stylistic power. His originality lies principally in his ability to incorporate his wide knowledge of European literature into his Italian inheritance, with a poet's (and translator's) close concern with language. His work reveals the clear influence of writers such as Edgar Allan Poe and Gogol. Susan Sontag saw him as something of a cross between Borges and Isak Dinesen, but thought him probably better than either. Landolfi constantly strives to enrich his own style, drawing on obscure or even archaic formulations and at times creating his own languages. In an almost Pirandellian fashion, Landolfi is constantly haunted by the unresolved conflict between art and life. He wrote a number of short stories and novels, poetry and theatrical pieces, the early work being in general the most significant, particularly the works of his so-called 'youthful maturity', the collection of short stories Dialogo dei massimi sistemi (1937). La pietra lunare (1939), his first novel, opens on a grotesque and almost hallucinatory scene of 'provincial life' from which the main character, Giovancarlo, is possessed by Gurù, the goat-girl, who allures him through a realm of phantasmagorical horror into the bowels of the earth and an erotic initiation. The world seems divided between two opposing realities, between the misery of everyday life and another strange and marvellous world. Racconto d'autunno (1947) is his best-known work outside Italy. Its story is, in more ways than one, a metaphor for an end to the old and the beginning of the new. While ghosts, terror and war dominate the landscape, and a gothic horror story is the main plot, there is nonetheless a sense that this book is a lamentation on an epoch that came to a violent end during World War II. Cancroregina (1950) is a strange science-fiction story, in the form of a diary written by a man who is stuck in orbit in outer space and cannot return to Earth. A caso, a collection of short stories, won him the Strega Prize in 1975. In 1996 his daughter Idolina founded the Centro Studi Landolfiani.