Novelist and short-story writer Carlo Cassola is recognized as an advocate of the poetics of the subliminal as well as a poet of the everyday who transposes the banality of material appearance into a vision of the transcendental. His intention was not to obtain the sublime but, like William Wordsworth or Wallace Stevens, to redeem the quotidian moment. Cassola's best pages provide singular moments of insight into existence.

Throughout his long career Cassola not only refused to identify himself with the various currents in postwar Italian literature--Neorealism, experimentalism, Marxism, or "Gruppo '63"--but he also willfully criticized and at times peremptorily wrote works to oppose these contemporary trends. Occasionally, he found himself at the center of controversy: during the early 1960s, for instance, he was attacked by old-guard neorealists for having abandoned the tenets of social realism and by young avant-gardists for his old-fashioned narrative discourse.

Carlo Cassola...