Fantastic tales

"Giulia's corpse ... rests in her shroud as if wrapped in the veils of her virginal bed. Her beauty has lost none of its seductiveness. A white dress, light, almost diaphanous, covers her modest figure ... Her pure white hands lie at her sides with the gentle surrender of sleep, and only her feet, pointing upward and joined together, bear witness to the horrible rigidity of death." This passage from "Bouvard," a macabre evocation of obsessive love beyond the grave typifies the eerie narratives in Fantastic Tales. The first Gothic tales published in the Italian language, Tarchetti's strange stories recall and sometimes imitate those of Edgar Allan Poe, E.T.A. Hoffmann, and Mary Shelley. In "A Spirit in a Raspberry," a nobleman is possessed by the soul of a servant girl; "The Letter U" recounts a man's mysterious phobia about that letter; the unexpected gift of everlasting life becomes a dreaded, endless curse in "The Elixir of Immortality." William Weaver, translator of Italo Calvino and Umberto Eco, writes: "While current Italian literature in English translation is closely followed by publishers, critics, and readers, the Italian writers of the past ... are largely ignored. Lawren