BUFALINO, Gesaulado 1920-1996

PERSONAL: Born November 15, 1920, in Comiso, Sicily, Italy; died June 14, 1996; married Giovanna Leggio, 1982. Education: Attended universities of Catania and Palermo.

CAREER: Istituto Magistrale di Vittoria, professor of Italian and history, 1949-75; fiction writer and translator. Military service: Partisan solider in World War II.

AWARDS, HONORS: Campiello Prize, 1981, for Diceria dell'untore; Scanno Prize, 1986; Castiglione di Sicilia, 1987; Premio Strega, 1988, for Le memzongne delle notte.

WRITINGS:

Diceria dell'untore, Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1981, translation by Stephen Satarellie published as The Plauge-Sower, Il Poligrafico Piemontese (Hygiene, CO), 1988.

Mueseo d'ombre (short stories; title means "Museum of Shadows"), Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1982.

L'amaro miele, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1982.

Dizionario dei personnagi di romanzo da Don Chisciotte all'Innominabile, Il Saggiatore (Milan, Italy), 1982.

Argo il cieco, ovvero i sogni della memoria, Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1984, translation by Patrick Creagh published as Blind Argus; or, The Fables of the Memory, Collins Harvill (London, England), 1988.

Cere perse (short stories; title means "Lost Faces"), Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1985.

(With Mario Monteverdi and Enzo Papa) Incontro con Pietro Palma: itinerario tra le isole, Ediprint (Siracusa, Italy), 1986.

L'uomo invaso e altre invenzione (title means, "The Possessed Man and Other Stories"), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1986.

Il malpensante: Lunairo dell'anno che fu, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1987.

(With Nunzio Zago) Gesualdo Bufalino: la figura e l'opera, Pungitopo (Marina di Patti, Italy), 1987.

La luce e il lutto, Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1988.

Le memzongne della notte, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1988, translation by Patrick Creagh published as Night's Lies (also known as Lies of the Night), Collins Harvill (London, England), 1990.

Saline di Sicilia, Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1988.

Invito alle Fêtes galantes di Verlaine, Sciardelli (Milan, Italy), 1989.

(With Giovanna Bufalino) Il matrimonio illustrato: testi d'ogni tempo e paese scelti per norma dei celibi e memoria dei coniugati, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1989.

(Coauthor) Trittico, Sanfilippo (Catania, Italy), 1989.

Saldi d'autunno, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1990.

Il guerrin meschino: frammento di un'opera di pupi, Girasole (Cantania, Italy), 1991.

L'inchiostro del diavolo, Sciardelli (Milan, Italy), 1991.

Qui pro quo, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1991.

Calende greche: ricordi d'una vita immaginaria (novel; title means "Greek Kalends: Memories of an Imaginary Life"), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1992.

Il tempo in posa: immagini di una Sicilia perduta, Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1992.

Lamento del vecchio puparo, Edizioni dell'Elefante (Rome, Italy), 1992.

(With Nunzio Zago) Cento Sicilie: testimonianze per un ritratto: antologia di testi, Nuova Italia (Florence, Italy), 1993.

Bluff di parole, Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1994.

Carteggio di gioventù: 1943-1950, Il Girasole (Valverde, Italy), 1994.

Il fiele ibleo, Avagliano (Cava dei Tirreni, Italy), 1995.

L'enfant du pardis: cinefilie, Salarchi immagini (Cosimo, Italy), 1996.

Tommaso e il fotografo cieco, ovvero Il patatrac (novel; title means "Tommaso and the Blind Photographer"), Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1996.

In corpore vili: autoritratto letterario: opera postuma, Gattopardo (Massa e Cozzile, Italy), 1997.

(With others) Conversazione con Gesaulado Bufalino: essere o riessere, Nuova Omnicron (Rome, Italy), 1997.

Contributor to Names and Tears and Other Stories: Forty Years of Italian Fiction, Graywolf Press (St. Paul, MN), 1990; and The New Italian Novel, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1993.

OTHER

(Editor) Gioacchino Iacono and Francesco Meli, Comiso ieri: immagini di vita signorile e rurale, Sellerio (Palermo, Italy), 1978.

(Translator) Jean Giradoux, Susanne e il pacifico, Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1980.

(Translator) Madame de la Fayette, L'amor geloso, Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1981.

(Editor and translator) Ernest Renan and Jean Gieradaux, Due preghiere, Sellerio (Palermo, Italy), 1981.

(Author of introduction) Gustave Flaubert, Memorie di un pazzo, Passigli (Florence, Italy), 1983.

(Translator) Charles Baudelaire, I fiori del male, Mondadori (Milan, Italy), 1983.

(Translator) Terence, I due fratelli, Istituo nazioniale del dramma antico (Siracusa, Italy), 1983.

(Translator) Victor Hugo, Le orientali, Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1985.

(Author of text) Giuseppe Leone, L'isola nuda: aspetti del paesaggio, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1988.

(Translator) Charles Baudelaire, Per Poe, Sellerio (Palmero, Italy), 1988.

(Author of preface) Bruno Caruso, Mitologia, Lombardi (Siracusa, Italy), 1989.

(Author of text with Adriano Baccilieri) Clemente Fava: Opere 1975-1990: Palazzo dei Diamanti, centro Attivtà Visive 10 marzo-14 aprile, Grafis Industrie Frafiche (Bologna, Italy), 1991.

(Author of preface) Enzo Leopardi, Il signore delle isole, Prova d'Autore (Catania, Italy), 1991.

(Author of text, with others) Il colore della fede: la religiosità in Salvatore Fiume, Paoline (Cinisello Ballsamo, Italy), 1992.

(Author of preface) La Sicilia e il cinema, Maimone (Catania, Italy), 1993.

(Editor and author of introduction) Matteo Maria Boiardo, Istituto Poligrafico e Zecca dello Stato (Rome, Italy), 1995.

(Author of text) Verga e il cinema, Maimone (Catania, Italy), 1996.

(Author of text, with others) Maria Teresa Serafini, Come si scrive un romanzo, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1996.

(Translator) Ramon Gomez de la Serna, Sghiribizzi, Bompiani (Milan, Italy), 1997.

SIDELIGHTS: Gesaulado Bufalino's story "is a remarkable case of late flowering," according to Peter Hainsworth. Writing in The New Italian Novel, Hainsworth explained: "Whilst, on his own account, he has written stories and poems since his youth, [Bufalino] had turned sixty when he published his first novel." The book was Diceria dell'untore, an autobiographical work that the Sicilian schoolteacher had begun just after World War II. He left the work unfinished for decades until a Palermo editor saw the manuscript in 1971 and persuaded Bufalino to finish the draft. The resulting book, completed ten years later, was a great critical and popular success, paving the way for further Bufalino novels and stories.

Diceria dell'untore is the first-person story of a young man who, having just escaped slaughter as a World War II soldier, finds himself virtually sentenced to death when he returns home diagnosed with tuberculosis. Committed to a sanitarium, the narrator awaits his fate along with other condemned characters, including a young dancer, Marta, with whom he engages in a gallows romance. In a plot twist, the young man learns he alone will survive the disease, twisting his relationship with Marta, whose death marks the climax of the story. The author, according to Dictionary of Literary Biography contributor Rosetta di Pace, "Is able to capture the whole personality of his characters through their gestures. With Marta it is her gait, which still shows a trace of the trained ballerina, and which exerted a great sexual allure on the narrator."

Key to the mood of the book, as well as a theme in much of Bufalino's writing, is the interpretation of death. Typical of his style is the depiction of Marta's demise from tuberculosis. As di Pace noted, that event "is described strictly from a naturalistic perspective in all its concrete and physical horror, a presentation that underscores Bufalino's belief that physical death is the final end. He makes no allowances for the mysteries of the cosmic energy that fuels the universe as well as the human body or for that possible survival of the spirit because he equates death with eternity." As New York Times Book Review writer Julia Markus stated, for the soldier who invested his emotions in Marta, "his last outing [with her] and the graphic and moving scene of her death, are extraordinary....The secret he keeps, that he's going to live, creates, according to the narrator, a further distance between him and his doomed lover. But to this reader, it is exactly that distancing that opens up a compassion and humanity in the young hero." Daphne Day in Southern Humanities Review acknowledged Marta's death scene as a "tour de force."

Diceria dell'untore claimed the Campiello Prize, and a second Bufalino novel, Le menzongne delle notte, took Premio Strega honors. This book recalls such models as Thousand and One Arabian Nights and Canterbury Tales in its setup of several nineteenth-century political prisoners who tell stories to pass time the night before their scheduled execution. The main characters—a student, a baron, a soldier and a poet—receive an unusual offer from their jailer: their lives will be spared if one of the prisoners reveals the name of their mysterious leader during the long night. Will one of them bend to the offer and betray "[not] an idea, but only a man," as the jailer puts it? But can they trust the jailer to honor his word after receiving the leader's name?

In a Listener article, Harriett Gilbert praised Le memzonge delle notte as "a skeptical survey of human (or, more precisely, male) beliefs, aspirations and values, a survey conducted throughout with integrity and wit. But what is revealed in the final chapter, while true to all that's preceded it, washes back to life everything up to a higher and more exciting position: one in which it is suddenly clear that scepticism may also have faith, self-knowledge, courage, and honour a sense of humour." According to Patrick McGrath, writing in Washington Post Book World, "the truly distinctive aspect of this dense and tantalizing short novel is that it combines political and philosophical discourse of a deeply skeptical, self-reflexive tenor . . . with a narrative zest and drive of the most traditional kind."

Tommaso e il fotografo cieco, a novel published following Bufalino's death, also won critical notice. This novel, "about the entanglement of truth and invention," in the words of New Statesman reviewer Lucy Roeber, centers on a man who abandons family and career to live the life of a reclusive would-be novelist. Scorning those who would draw Tommaso out, the protagonist is drawn only to Bartolomeo, the blind photographer, whose murder sends Tommaso on a search for answers. With Bufalino "[weaving] plots within plots, and [painting] characters so strange and elusive that they too are never quite real," noted Carolyn Moorehead in Times Literary Supplement, "the result is a book which is at the same time comic and unsettling."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

BOOKS

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 196: Italian Novelists since World War II, 1965-1995, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999.

The New Italian Novel, Edinburgh University Press (Edinburgh, Scotland), 1993.

PERIODICALS

American Book Review, May-June, 1990, Lois Nesbitt, "Double Ordeal," p. 25.

Choice, December, 1991, C. Fantazzi, review of Lies of the Night, p. 598.

Independent, June 22, 1996, p. 12.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1991, review of Lies of the Night, p. 119; May 1, 1993, review of Blind Argus, p. 544.

Listener, June 21, 1990, Harriett Gilbert, "Midnight Feasts," p. 35.

New Statesman, April 10, 2000, Lucy Roeber, "Hall of Mirrors," p. 63.

New York Times Book Review, October 30, 1988, Julia Markus, "Brothers in Fraud," p. 24; May 19, 1991, M. J. Fitzgerald, "The Scaffold Awaits," p. 12.

Observer, May 7, 2000, Scott Bradfield, "Absolutely Fabulist," p. 15.

Quill & Quire, November, 1989, Paul Stuewe, "Of Some Import," p. 25.

Southern Humanities Review, summer, 1990, Daphne Day, review of The Plaugue-Sower, p. 289.

Times Literary Supplement, October 9, 1981, Masolino d'Amico, "Consumptive Communities," p. 1172; October 7, 1988, Peter Hainsworth, "Sicilian Myth and Reality," p. 1096; October 12, 1991, Hainsworth, "Consoling Paradoxes," p. 1088; July 19, 1996, Lilian Pizzichini, "Between the Cracks," p. 13; May 12, 2000, Caroline Moorehead, "Worm's-eye View," p. 22.

Washington Post Book World, April 24, 1994, Patrick McGrath, "Prisoners' Dilemma," p. 5.

World Literature Today, autumn, 1982, Joseph Siracusa, review of Diceria dell'untore, p. 667; summer, 1983, Siracusa, review of Museo d'ombre, p. 441; winter, 1987, Michela Montante, review of Cere perse, p. 84; summer, 1992, Montante, review of Qui Pro Quo, p. 492; spring, 1993, Charles Klopp, review of Calende greche, p. 350; winter, 1995, Charles Klopp, review of Il Guerrin Meschino, p. 115.

OBITUARIES:

PERIODICALS

Times (London, England), June 19, 1996, p. 23.*