An Autumn Story (novel)

Did You Know?

• The novel is the basis for the television film Racconto d'autunno, directed by Domenico Campana and starring Stefano Patrizi.
• The television adaptation was broadcast on RAI in February 1981 to a viewership of over eleven million.

Plot

The story follows a nameless fugitive during the German occupation of Italy near the end of World War II, though the setting evokes timelessness. He discovers a mountain mansion where an old, evasive nobleman reluctantly lets him stay. Drawn to the house's labyrinthine rooms and strange human sounds, the protagonist prolongs his visit. He finds a painting of a woman over the fireplace and later discovers a woman named Lucia wearing clothes matching the portrait. Spying on the nobleman, he witnesses a ritual that makes the nobleman's dead wife rise from the fireplace. The protagonist screams, the woman vanishes, and the nobleman dies of a stroke. The fugitive escapes but returns days later; Lucia explains she is the nobleman's daughter, kept hidden and treated as a wife. The two fall in love, but an invading army arrives; soldiers rape and kill Lucia before the protagonist. He withdraws to the mansion, obsessing over her.

Reception

The novel has been read as a resistance story that questions the concept of liberation, addressing Italian war trauma by incorporating the then-unacknowledged mass rape and murder by Allied soldiers after the battle of Monte Cassino. Alexander Stille of the Los Angeles Times noted the gothic genre, language, and setting recall Nikolai Gogol and Edgar Allan Poe, with parallels to Poe's 'The Fall of the House of Usher'; he found the novel best before it 'degenerates' into melodrama, though the genre use is self-conscious and explores a 'belief in the hypnotic power of language', portraying Landolfi as 'an archaic modernist' with 'esoteric purposes'. Publishers Weekly called the book surprising, riveting, and engaging for the senses, with 'piercingly nightmarish imagery'. Alan Ryan of The Washington Post stressed similarities to Poe and praised Joachim Neugroschel's English translation as 'gorgeous', noting the language conveys eeriness and longing for a simpler past; beyond political implications, the novel fascinates as 'familiar but really like nothing else, indifferent to time and fashion, intensely obsessive'.