Gogol's Wife & Other Stories by Landolfi, Tommaso - 1963

E-034: New Directions. Very Good in Very Good dust jacket. 1963. First Edition; First Printing. Hardcover. Hardcover. 8vo. New Directions, New York, 1963. 183 pgs. First Edition/First Printing. DJ has light shelf-wear present to the DJ extremities. Bound in cloth boards with titles present to the spine and front board. Boards have light shelf-wear present to the extremities. No ownership marks present. Text is clean and free of marks. Binding tight and solid. The first book by Landolfi to be published in the United States, a collection of stories written over a period of 25 years. Gandolfi has been called the Italian Kafka, linked with the surrealists, compared to Borges - but his remains a unique voice, imaginative and ironic. FROM THE PUBLISHER - The title story in this collection is claimed by its narrator to be a chapter in his biography of the Russian writer, Nikolai Gogol. He begins by saying he knows some intimate details of Gogol s life and that as his biographer he feels obligated to reveal them, though as his friend he might have kept all this to himself. After setting the reader up for some perhaps prurient facts, the narrator tells us that Gogol s wife was a life-sized balloon, anatomically correct and quite voluptuous. Claiming to be the only person besides Gogol who has ever seen this creation, the narrator goes on to tell us an occasion where he heard her speak. He describes how she developed her own personality, in spite of the fact that she was a balloon, and that she even contracted syphilis, which subsequently infected Gogol. The narrator and Gogol are celebrating the silver anniversary of Gogol and his wife when the novelist gets insanely irritated with her, inserts a bicycle pump into her, and inflates her until she explodes. Gogol then throws the rubber pieces into the fire (much as he had burned his manuscripts earlier). He also throws into the fire a balloon baby boy. The story closes with the narrator again defending his position of biographer, providing the truth about Gogol to the reader. E-034; 8vo 8" - 9" tall; 183 pages .