Black Friday from 11/29
10352 La casa dei Desideri
Rudyard Kipling. Edited and with an introduction by Jorge Luis Borges
1979 I ed. .
Language: Italian
This collection of Rudyard Kipling’s short stories shows his penchant for the supernatural, a lesser-known side of the British writer’s output that gradually emerges in his tales.
Each of these tales has the richness and density of a novel. In The Wish House, a woman tells another woman a magical and painful story; they are both too humble for wonder; they accept the unbelievable with the same resignation with which they accept everyday facts. In A Sahibs’ War, fever and the presence of opium make the supernatural more plausible. On A Madonna of the Trenches, set in the 1914 war, falls the lofty shadow of Canto V of Dante’s Inferno. The Eye of Allah is not an imaginary tale, but an impossible tale. Of the stories in this book, perhaps the most moving is The Gardener. One of its peculiarities is that a miracle takes place in it; the protagonist ignores it but the reader knows. All the circumstances are realistic, but the story is not.