Volume 37, Number 14 · September 27, 1990
At the Bottom of the Pond
By Gabriele Annan
An Autumn Story
by Tommaso Landolfi, translated by Joachim Neugroschel
Eridanos Press, 145 pp., $11.00 (paper)
Landolfi's work is black, gothic, perverse, mysterious, desperate, disturbing, sometimes horrific, sometimes revolting. An occasional English translation floats up like a viscous bubble on a dark pond. The first eruption was in 1963, when a collection of stories came to the surface under the title Gogol's Wife; in 1971 The Dial Press published another collection called Cancerqueen; a third collection, Words in Commotion and Other Stories, was brought out by Viking in 1986. Eridanos claims that An Autumn Story is Landolfi's first novel to be translated. It's actually more of a novella, both in form and length: a mere 145 pages, lavishly laid out with wide margins and blank pages between the chapters, so that it looks longer than it is.
Review, 3093 words
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