This collection of short stories was the product of an unusual author. Campo, born in Italy in 1923, had been a sickly child (heart condition) and grew up secluded by her wealthy family in a villa in Tuscany. In the 1960s, she moved to Rome, and lived in a convent for long periods of time until her untimely death in 1977.
Some of her earlier work borders a little too closely to twee for my taste, and I do not share her enthusiasm for Catholic mysticism (not being brought up Catholic myself), but her enthusiasm for fairy tales strikes a chord with me. As a child, this was by far and away my favorite genre, and I found it interesting the way she presents this medium. As she posits, all great fairy tales are: a quest for the kingdom of heaven, a pursuit of an unknown and inexplicable vision.
There are also other enthusiasms – such as for the poets William Carlos Williams and Marianne Moore, the author Katherine Mansfield, and above all the composer Chopin, the ultimate Romantic and, I thought, an unusual choice for a sheltered young Italian woman.
Writing of Chopin’s etudes, she calls out the inflexible metronome . . . by which tenderness and turbulence, rubati and turbati, ecstasy and piercing premonition were mercilessly measured, and compares them to the polonaises with their sovereign hauteur, the explosive aerial staccato, the Lipizzaner elegance” and the sprezzatura, or studied carelessness, of his mazurkas. Oddly enough, she doesn’t have much to say about any other composer, but I could read her glorify Chopin all day long.