Admittedly I bought this book because I liked the sound of the author's name and the cover was so old-fashioned. It's The Keeper of Ruins by Gesualdo Bufalino. It's been translated from the Italian by Patrick Creagh.
The book is a collection of short stories that tell some of the oddest tales. I'm now trying to find the other books by Bufalino.
Here are some of the stories.
In Being An Angel a realises that he is "no longer a man, but an angel, probably a seraph." He's a man that has until now been comfortable in his own skin and identity and with the vagaries of his very human body. Now "a stranger has taken me over, and from now it's a toss-up who 'I' may be". He finds wings sprouting from his back, his hair falls out and grows back. Only this time it's fine and blond. His mouth opens and words come out of them that he never planned to say. Finally, one day in church the voice inside breaks all boundaries and "I burst forth with an unmistakable blasphemy that drowned out singers and instruments alike, and hushed them on the instant." Taken away to an asylum he finally settles down to communing with that which is within him ... "keeping vigil, a finger on my lips, before the bedchambers of the dying; and at the dawn one day, with flaming brand, slaying the dragon."
This one entitled Eurydice's Homecoming is one of my favourites. There she sits at the door to the Underworld thinking about her husband. The one who turned back at the last instant trapping her forever in the land of Death. "Once again she saw the sequel: the upward scramble behind him on that thorny, stony path, hobbling on foot still throbbing with the venom of the asp. Glad at the sight of him, even if only his back; glad at the ban that would sweeten the delight of soon re-embracing him... But then he had turned. Why? And finally she understands why.
Trouser-peg's Revenge gives the role of postmen a whole new meaning. 'Nzulu, known as Trouser-peg was a "weedy, ugly, penniless fellow" who "had married the superbly curvaceous Aida. Of course everyone is shocked and scandalised. It was his "doglike look of inflexible servility" that had won her over. "As if every instant he were offering her his soul, his entire life, on a charger. Ready to jump out of the window, no questions asked." 'Nzulu is the postman and Aida has a habit of opening and reading some of the mail ... "just for fun and games, and the venomous pleasure of espionage." "Until the time when, strolling beneath the palm-trees ... she discovered a closer and more appetising .... the glad-eyes and mustachios of ... the minicipal policeman. And then ... "what the eye doesn't see the heart doesn't grieve over." Or does it?
In After The Flood, Noah waits for the waters to recede. Every day for a 150 days he'd watch the rains fall. And in all those days all he saw was the water "how they roared and rolled, turbid and hostile... and never, never as far as the eye could see, glimpsing anything but a looming and crashing avalanche of leaden cataracts..." Finally the rain stops. The earth has been washed clean to start anew. The he sees a dove. His dove high in the sky ... Noah did not spy the hawk ....
There's many, many more tales in the book and as it says in the foreword ... Anyone who enjoys words must enjoy Bufalino; but above all he leaves the reader with his own particular, and particularly vivid, sense of infinite possibility. Anything might happen, anything might be true; throw a question at the Universe and back will come the answer "yes". He has written, "God is better than he seems; Creation doesn't do him justice."
) in some ways, they do, as a series, fit more comfortably into the straight fantasy genre. Also, not all the books in the series are that good, though (considering the number of the things) a surprising amount of them are... and are often quite literate, old-fashioned story-telling with a solidity and thoughtfulness to them often lacking in the field, I find....
