This new anthology includes a whole batch of writers under forty, many of them previously unpublished in English: the Chekovian Tondelli with his story of Italian junkies and deadbeats who hang around in The Station Bar; Sandro Veronesi with his very short A Worthwhile Death, the witty Pia Fontana and the highly esteemed Daniel Del Guidice.


There’s a good dose in this anthology of the political, critical fiction that the Italians seem to do so much better than us; as in the light touch of Enrico Palandri’s PEC or the awareness of other people’s history in Vincenzo Consolo’s The Photographer. Italians do have more political consciousness than Anglo-Saxons, (even if this rarely produces any great results in practice) and left-wing dailies such as L’Unità and Il Manifesto regularly publish short stories by excellent young writers like Valeria Viganò, Sandro Veronesi and Sandra Petrignani.


The Quality of Light serves as tasty appetiser to a world of exciting, youthful writing pleasantly different from the local product provided by English and American publishers. This is an excellent, rich collection — our only grouse is that apart from Piera Oppezza’s strange and clever scene of ‘double-intimacy’ and the doomed Tondelli’s pimpish-punkish toilet sex, the stories gathered here would never lead the innocent reader to guess what a sensual nation the Italians are.

‘The child has a mouth like a suction cup, its hair is sweaty from crying, she holds it with rigid arms and her unbuttoned shirt shows her body down to her navel, her face and hair are devastated by sleep. A witch, a feverish witch in the night and perhaps her milk is a subtle poison, as sticky as the juice of certain plants of the swamps. The lady stayed there and watched her, uncertainly fingering the tin of talcum powder, then the little pink hairbrush, the bottle of Sangemini water, her long silk nightdress which gleams among the lilies of Florence.’ p7 The Wet Nurse Rosetta Loy