Tales of obsession and the grotesque combined with the Gothic, anyone? If you enjoy such stories as those penned by Edgar Allen Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Thomas Legotti, and Jorge Luis Borges, you are in for a real treat with this Tommaso Landolfi love story, perhaps the most bizarre love story I’ve ever encountered, a much overlooked classic published as part of the prestigious Eridanos Library, the only novel by the author to be translated into English.

Landolfi has been referred to as “that Italian weirdo” which contains a modicum of truth since much of the author’s fiction is as weird as weird can be. For example, in his short story The Labrenas, an aristocratic first person narrator relates how he has always been terrified at the prospect of an invasion by small reptilian creatures, labrenas, overrunning his house. One pitch-black night, while settling down for sleep, he imagines the labrenas approaching; he falls into such a physical paralysis his family takes him for dead and arranges his funeral. Once in the casket downstairs in the parlor (all through this ordeal, he has maintained full awareness), he is driven mad – a labrena has found a way to sneak into his casket so it can scrutinize him face-to-face with its round, bulging, glittering eyes.

Gogol’s Wife tells the tale of how the wife of Nikolai Gogol is not a woman at all, or, for that matter, a human being; rather Nikolai Gogol’s wife is a life-size inflatable flesh-colored rubber doll, nude in all seasons. Things goes well for the couple, at least for a time, before Nikolai Vasilyevich becomes progressively more disgusted and agitated with his wife who refuses to conduct herself in a gentile manner, even when entertaining house guests.

With the tale Uxoricide another aristocrat tells us how easy it is to murder people – case in point, he explains in exquisite detail how he murdered his wife by gagging her and binding her to a chair before engaging in a perfectly rational conversation outlining her faults and shortcomings, a conversation where all she could offer, by way of modest objection, was a constant, obnoxious “Mmmmmm” before succumbing to a massive heart attack.

And lastly, in Cancerqueen yet again another aristocrat recaps his boredom on earth leading him to join a half-mad space explorer blasting off in a rocket ship. Joris-Karl Huysmans’ novel of French decadence Against Nature meets Star Trek – wildly weird in the extreme.

Turning now to An Autumn Story, in a mountainous forest in Italy, fleeing both rebel and foreign troops, the narrator, a soldier, seeks refuge in a centuries-old isolated mansion inhabited by an aging reclusive aristocrat and his two huge wolfhounds. But the old man’s crumbling home contains much more, the entire atmosphere of this dark labyrinthine mansion is bathed in the gloomy Gothic. And there’s something even more foreboding – an unseen mysterious presence. It’s as if Tommaso Landolfi took his usual fistful of weirdness from his tales and spread it throughout this novel, creating what could be seen as a fresh combination: the weird Gothic.

Although the narrator first approaches the hidden mansion as a desperate, fatigued, half-starved soldier, we come to learn he also possesses the heart of both an aristocrat and a romantic poet. In his initial exploration of the rooms from the outside, peering through the large, iron-grilled windows at two wolfhounds with ferocious faces, we read: “I thought I noticed something desperate deep in the eyes of the hounds, and my agitated nerves made me detect that same desperation in their howling, almost as if they were miserable creatures or souls in torment, bound to that place by some cruel spell.”

Insanity, madness, obsession, sorcery, spirit possession play their part in this Landolfi tale but more than anything, all one-hundred-fifty pages are coated with a haunting atmosphere, a most peculiar brooding tinged with menace. At one point, the narrator contemplates a portrait of a woman on the wall in a downstairs dinning room. After describing her clothing and jewelry, her haughty bearing and pale skin and delicate features, he observes: “However, the most vivid and disturbing element was her huge dark eyes. Their deep gaze seemed to have the same character as the old man’s gaze and, hence, that of the dogs: It was animated by the same gloom, indeed a more imperious one, and, simultaneously, by the same remote and pitiable bewilderment, if not desperation.”

For Italo Calvino the first rule of the game in reading Tommaso Landolfi is to expect a surprise that will rarely be pleasant or soothing. Curiously, from what I have written above, you might not think An Autumn Story could be a love story. But it is a love story. How the love story unfolds is the surprise.


Tommaso Landolfi (1908-1979) – Italian author, translator and aristocrat par excellence. Susan Sontag considered Landolfi’s fiction a cross between Jorge Luis Borges and Isak Dinesen.