Henry Martin

A Music Behind the Wall: Selected Stories, Vol. 1 Henry Martin 1st Us edition

The stories of the celebrated Italian author of The Iguana traverse more than fifty years, yet are timeless. They are concerned not so much with external reality as with moments in which an inner life?composed of perception and thought and fantasy?becomes visible. The ten stories in this first of two volumes of English translation touch nearly all of the modes Anna Maria Ortese has developed during her long and productive creative life, from the early "magical realism" to the most recent work which lies, as the translator notes, "at the edge of fable...[where] one listens to an otherworldly tale while casting a vigilant, questioning eye about the room in which it is told." Ortese plumbs the strangeness of the world, its mysterious reality, and the dramatic emotion contained within the solitary imagination. Elsewhere the author describes the urgency of her vision: "For adults?or among highly cultivated peoples?the whole world is the world of the obvious, of the commonplace.... But for children, or adolescents, or a certain sort of artist, that?s not the way things stand. Wherever they go, everything shines with a light that betrays no origins. Everything they touch?that flag, that horse, that ocean?is vibrant with electricity and leaves them wonderstruck. They understand what adults have ceased to understand: that the world is a heavenly body; that all things within and beyond the world are made of cosmic matter; and that their nature, their meaning?except for a dazzling gentleness?is unsoundable."