Fantastic Tales
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- $23.99
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- $23.99
Publisher Description
Lawrence Venuti, winner of a Guggenheim fellowship and the Global Humanities Translation Prize, among many other awards, has translated into English these Italian Gothic tales of obsessive love, mysterious phobias, and the hellish curse of everlasting life.
In this collection of nine eerie stories, Iginio Ugo Tarchetti switches effortlessly between the macabre and the breezily comical. Set in nineteenth-century Italy, his characters court spirits and blend in with the undead: passionate romances filled with jealousy and devotion are fueled by magic elixirs. Time becomes fluid as characters travel between centuries, chasing affairs that never quite prosper. First published by Mercury House in 1992.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Tarchetti (1839-1869) has been called an Italian Edgar Allan Poe, and in these nine exceptionally well-translated tales he does indeed share Poe's fascination with the gothic. Romance and death are frequent partners. Through dream visions of a centuries-old lover, a man receives intimations of his past lives and of his impending death (``The Legends of the Black Castle''); a deformed musician takes possession of an unattainable beauty's corpse (``Bouvard''). As Venuti points out, Tarchetti occupies a singular place in Italian literature as an antecedent of the great innovators of this century, including Calvino and Pirandello. A member of the scapigliaturi (literally, the disheveled ones)--a movement that, in Venuti's words, ``saw style as revolt''--Tarchetti imported his stories from abroad, rewriting works by Mary Shelley, the Alsatian collaborators Emile Erckmann and Louis-Alexandre Chatrian, and Theophile Gautier. While the stories are marvelous in and of themselves, in Venuti's thoughtful presentation they serve as entree into an equally strange and marvelous literary phenomenon.
