Voices from the Plains     by Gianni Celati, Translated by Robert Lumley Original title: Narratori delle pianure Original language: Italian Published by Serpent's Tail Publishing Ltd Pub. Date: 1990 Format: Paperback, 144 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.47 x 7.77 x 5.16 ISBN: 1852421436 List Price: $10.95, £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £7.19 Published by Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: 1989 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 158 pages List Price: £8.99 Not available for ordering

A man chooses to spend some weeks travelling across the North Italian plain, going town by town through precisely the sort of landscape no-one ever chooses to travel in. A landscape where little cement villas clumped together impose their dreariness on the almost sarcastically flat plain of the River Po, a region that is industrialised and ‘consumerised’. Celati, a kind of Italian George Orwell in his bleak and honest concern for the everyday, searches there for something profound. The stories in Voices are unornamented and unemphatic, influenced, perhaps, by the minimalist style that overtook American art and literature in the late 1970s; their apparent lack of emotion recalling the stories of Raymond Carver. Many of their characters — the young pharmacist who seduces the factory-owner’s daughter, or the old printer who tries to write a pamphlet explaining ‘what makes the world go on’ — end up trapped in useless, obsessive acts. These very acts, Celati suggests, make up ‘what life is: a web of ceremonial relationships which hold together something that has no substance.’


Celati has a particularly Italian sensitivity to landscape and in the story A Japanese Girl he transfers this sensitivity to Los Angeles, where to reach the house of the Japanese girl ‘you had to leave the city freeway, cross enormous bridges packed with trucks and cars in all eight lanes, exit to the north and out into a canyon, keep going as far as the Arco station...’ Here, landscape becomes the absence of landscape, of landmarks, of a sense of place.

‘The Woman on the doorstep had not moved, but she no longer looked the man in the face as she had done. Now she was looking at the ground. Then, the one-eyed man headed towards the car parked in the threshing yard, and, on reaching the car, turned to speak to her. He told her that everything looks different when you feel yourself to be out in the open, when you stop believing you can hide somewhere and be safe.’ pp122-123