Volume 1, Number 11 · January 23, 1964
Gogol's Grandson
By Susan Sontag
Gogol's Wife and Other Stories
by Tommaso Landolfi, translated by Raymond Rosenthal, by John Longrigg, by Wayland Young
New Directions, 183 pp., $4.00
Several years ago, Encounter published an extraordinary story by an Italian writer, quite unknown in English, named Tommaso Landolfi. The story was called 'Gogol's Wife.' It purports to be the account, told by a hanger-on of the great Russian writer, of Gogol's marriage to an inflatable rubber dummy, with whom he has a mysterious, exalted, and shameful relation. It was Landolfi's clean, deliberate style that was so striking: that, combined with a lovely freedom of invention, allowed him to bring off this incredibly pure potion of the grotesque and the ludicrous. It is difficult to praise 'Gogol's Wife' too highly. On the basis of this story, one instantly and gratefully acknowledged Landolfi as a writer of the first rank.
Review, 1903 words
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