Of Beasts & Men

GOGOL'S WIFE by Tommaso Landolfi. 1 83 pages. New Directions. $4.

In the medieval bestiaries, the habits of birds, beasts and reptiles proclaimed the glory of God. In this strange and fitful collection of short stories, Italian Author Tommaso Landolfi has created a kind of 20th century bestiary in which the animals speak not to the godhead in man but to the arid reaches of the human heart.

Truant Pet. The Two Old Maids is a story about two aging sisters who live in shabby seclusion with their ancient housekeeper and a beloved pet--a mettlesome monkey named Tombo, who, "though a eunuch, was, after all, the male of the house." One day the Mother Superior of the neighboring convent brings alarming news: Tombo has been seen stealing into the chapel at night where he ate the consecrated hosts, tried to say Mass, and even urinated on the altar. It is clear to one sister that he must die. The old maids consult two priests, the older of whom agrees with the death sentence for the reason that Tombo is a brute and cannot expiate his sin through repentance. It is too much for the younger priest. "Go ahead!" he shouts to the old maids. "Sacrifice that poor creature. Revenge yourself for your shame, your ridiculous impotence, your rancor, your rage." The sisters order the priest from the house, and while the housekeeper holds Tombo's arms, one of the sisters stabs him through the heart with a gold hatpin. "We're killing our brother!" shrieks one old maid as the other strikes.

Living Fable. Sunstroke is the fable of an owl who cowers before a rising sun that means resurrection to the rest of the world but only terror to him. Pastoral tells of extraordinary provincial people who suspend themselves in goatskin bags every winter in a hibernation that is a living death.

In the title story, Landolfi strikes a variation on a recurrent theme--man's need to destroy the objects of his love. For some obscure reason, Landolfi makes the classic Russian novelist Gogol the victim of his fantasy, perhaps because Gogol never married and was given to inventing imaginary affairs.

The sick object of Gogol's love is an inflatable rubber dummy that can be made to assume an infinite number of seductive shapes depending on the pressure to which it is inflated. But as Gogol's love grows, so does his distaste for his aging rubber wife, and the two "struggle so fiercely with each other in his heart" that on his silver wedding anniversary he deliberately overinflates his wife and blows her to bits, crying, "Oh, how I love her, how I love her, my poor, poor darling!"

Sometimes farcical, and sometimes weighted with tragic irony, these stories show man forever recoiling from the world into his cramped visions of self. Landolfi himself seems to be a master of the art. A resident of San Remo, he lives in seclusion with his wife and two daughters, appears in public only to gamble at the tables at the local casino. Characteristically, he has authorized only one photograph for publication--a head shot, with his outspread hand masking his face. At 55, he is highly Prized in Italian literary circles but almost unknown to the general public. Perhaps the most admired of his works is Rien Va, an imaginary diary in which he probes the struggles of one lonely, lost, defiant man in an incomprehensible universe. He is now at work on a novel consisting of a dialogue between a terrestrial creature and an immortal one, but he is not sure that he will finish it. "I don't know how to get out of it," says Landolfi. "It's ignoble."

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