Gogol's Wife and Other Stories

Rating:
Summary: An advise from Italy: read Landolfi!
Review: A strange, intelligent author today little known even here in Italy, Tommaso Landolfi wrote several wonderfully weird and surrealistic stories, oscillating among irony, nightmare and fear. Believe me: a great writer, and not a "great italian" writer, but a great one, period. If you love Calvino and Cortazar and, in general, the fantastic literature, you'll miss something if you don't know Landolfi.

Rating:
Summary: Wonderfully Funny!
Review: Landolfi has been called "the Italian Kafka" (according to the blurb on the back of the book), no doubt because of the surrealistic elements in his short stories. For example, Landolfi imagines Gogol's wife as an inflatible creature to be manipulated according to Gogol's will. In "Dialogue of the Greater Harmonies," a man learns a nonexistent language and feels cheated that the poems he has written in it can never really be shared. Through his stories, Landolfi shares deeper concerns about the importance of relationships and language and communication. It is unfortunate that his work is not better known.