The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories is an anthology of forty Italian short stories edited by Jhumpa Lahiri. It includes stories by such authors as Alberto Moravia, Natalia Ginzburg, Primo Levi, Italo Calvino (The Baron in the Trees), Elsa Morante (Arturo’s Island), Dino Buzzati (Catastrophe & Other Stories), Luigi Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), Cesare Pavese (The Moon and The Bonfire), and others. I am reviewing six of the short stories below, and they all seem to revolve around limitations, hardships or eccentricities.

Silence by Aldo Palazzeschi (translated by Erica Segre and Simon Carnell) – ★★★★1/2

“There was not a moment in the day when silence did not fill the place entirely; there was not a single nook or cranny that the silence had not filled with the imposing solemnity of its presence.” Eccentric, reclusive man Benedetto Vai seems to have taken a vow of silence because he does not utter even one word to anyone, not even to his housekeeper Leonia, and this state of affairs seems to have been ongoing for years and years. And, then, he starts to accumulate the finest cutlery that seems to exist in the world. Is he preparing for some feast, and will the house be finally filled with voices? Palazzeschi gets his reader’s attention effortlessly by presenting, and with much finesse, a very unusual character who has one strange lifelong whim. The melancholic cadence is not as strong, but there is still this clear message that, at times, the greatest fight in a person’s life is their fight with themselves.

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