Appearances     by Gianni Celati, Translated by S Hood Original title: Quattro novelle sulle apparenze Original language: Italian Published by Serpent's Tail Publishing Ltd Pub. Date: 1992 Format: Paperback, 160 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.43 x 7.80 x 5.00 ISBN: 1852422122 List Price: $14.99, £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £8.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $14.99 Published by Serpent's Tail Pub. Date: 1991 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 126 pages List Price: £8.99 Not available for ordering

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Like his other translated book Voices From the Plains, Celati’s Appearances speaks of the flat North Italian plain and so is set far from the Tuscan idyll of cypresses and dark Signorine sighing in shuttered bedrooms of picture-book Italy. In fact things are grim at times but never humourless and the book is worth reading if only for the marvellous and sensually liberating Conditions of Light on the Via Emilia, the story of the landscape painter Emanuelle Menini, who ‘knew very well how the light falls from the sky, how it touches and envelops things’. The story is a revelatory treatise on the quality of light and colours, illustrated both by vistas that are degraded — modern villa-homes with their ‘overbright colours of the flowers in front of the doors and acrylic paints gleaming on the walls...the colours were all sharp like in a commercial traveller’s book of samples’ — and ones that are sublime, ‘Finally as we went down the long road, he pointed out to us...the beautiful spring shadows in the ditches’.


The painter Menini, like the writer Celati, moves slowly through the world, looking at it with real attention and he is willing to share his appreciation, his hard-won knowledge of what the world really looks like, with us.

‘On the phone he said: «Listen to me carefully, Luciano. Light and shade don’t go well together these days because of the dirty air which doesn’t give good shadows and then it gets into our lungs as well. And like drunks we try to make up for this by putting clear and lively colours everywhere, so that they can be seen better. But we get more and more drunk because the lively colours forget the shadows and the twilights and make you stupid — that’s the fact of the matter.’ p51