Plague-Sower     by Gesualdo Bufalino, Translated by Stephen Sartarelli Original title: Diceria dell’untore Original language: Italian Published by Marsilio Pub Pub. Date: November 1988 Format: Paperback, 186 pages Dimensions: 0.75 x 8.67 x 5.47 in. ISBN: 0941419134 List Price: $13.00, £13.00 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £13.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $13.00 Published by Marsilio Publishers Pub. Date: 1988 Format: Hardcover, 186 pages ISBN: 0941419126 List Price: $22.00 Not available for ordering Published by Eridanos P Pub. Date: 1988 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 192 pages List Price: £14.95 Not available for ordering Published by Eridanos P Pub. Date: 1988 Pub. Place: UK Format: Paperback, 192 pages List Price: £7.95 Not available for ordering Published by Eridanos Pub. Place: USA Format: Hardcover Not available for ordering

By transferring the exquisitely Nordic atmosphere of the sanitorium into a Sicily of baroque radiance and gleaming seas Bufalino perhaps meant to place his story of sickness and death within the tradition of the nineteenth century novel. In fact it’s 1946, the war is over, but up in the mountains; ‘Mount Athos, the fortress of La Rochelle, Ucciardone prison... there were so many enclosures and solitary retreats to which I liked to compare our situation at La Rocca. Nor did I forget the castle of Atlante. That is, a place of visions destined not to last. Marta was one such vision.’


In this place of visions the narrator has a vision of his own which is not destined to endure either; his love story with Marta. She is an ex-ballerina with a troubled and mysterious past, laden with misfortune. He becomes influenced by the destructive vein within her which longs for catharsis but equally she excises ‘that weakness of the heart which wants to learn to die’, leaving him in the end with a little strength for himself.


With a highly developed control over his language Bufalino reveals the ‘writing self ‘, releasing it from behind the protective wall where he felt as a young man he would always belong. He evokes a landscape, a time and place both private and shared which seems to live again between the countryside and the sea. His choice of words is always erudite and dignified, like a perfectly-aimed arrow never missing its target.

‘Usually I have little tolerance for those who recount their dreams even though I so often fall prey to the same vice. But with her it was different, and I listened to her lovingly. She was as though raving at my side, talebearer of some hereafter, sprinkling her long delirium with a string of catchy, contrived monologues of the sort that we love so much to hear in popular songs and the lamentations of poets. Shavings, her speeches were, shavings of pinchbeck, a moulting plumage, a fine dust of seed pearls and trifles belonging to a dethroned queen of hearts, beneath which one glimpsed — just barely, but it was there — the implacable bone of death. Which I wanted to reach, having no other means, with the curious sword of sex...’ p107