Blind Argus by Gesualdo Bufalino

Bufalino, a Sicilian, won Italy’s top literary prize, The Strega, for his novel, Night Lies

Patrick Creagh won the John Florie Prize for his translation of Blind Argus

Blind Argus is a kind of prose poem of reflections of a not–quite–so–young man’s year (1951) as a teacher in a southern Sicilian town. Climatically, the summer of ’Fifty–One is perfect, but emotionally for Gesualdo there is mostly the bitterness of unrequited love as he pursues the beautiful but wayward Maria Venera. Maria’s old rogue of a grandfather, Don Alvise, asks Gesualdo to become tutor to the gypsy–hearted girl. Heaven sent chance, but it proves only to be a troubling propinquity and torment, filling Gesualdo’s mind with imaginary lovers, while Maria gives out ambiguous signals — like a weathervane in gusty wind. Gesualdo’s friends can see that he is fixated, but infatuation will run its course, and every glance weakens his will and bends his step in her direction . . .

Not that Gesualdo is oblivious to the charms and delights of other girl’s in Modica — including those to whom he teaches literature. There is the still youthful looking Isolina, with cake crumbs round her mouth, and a passion for both poetry and popular romances, but who seems to be warming to the tentative approaches of Licausi, a colleague of Gesualdo’s. There is Cecilia, an older beauty with whom Gesualdo does succeed in having a week of requited passion — to the proudly unpossessive delight of his girl pupils, who sit round the golden couple on the summer afternoon beach. But this is a short–lived affair, and life without Maria Venera still seems insupportable . . .

The truth is that none of Gesualdo’s loves are really suited to him: they either have their eyes on settled domesticity or they are as restless as butterflies, flitting from one idea to the next, and quite impossible to net. Gesualdo finds them all so infuriatingly ill–timed to his age and circumstances, though he is mostly saved from precipitate action of any kind by his constant meditations — on his life and on life in general.

It may be that some of this novel is autobiographical, but it does not read as if it is. True, Bufalino calls his hero Gesualdo, but then he also has interludes where he addresses the reader and teasingly discusses how the novel is progressing, expresses doubts about it, or outlines a possible direction it might take — much as a twentieth–century Laurence Sterne might have done. But its highly inventive and poetic use of language keeps the reader always in the realm of dreams, of snapshots once vital but now compressed into fading albums, evoking memories that are shuffled out of order in the mind. It is the imaginative juxtaposition of those dreams and memories with the everyday actions and conversations of the inhabitants of Modica that makes this novel such a sustained and satisfying piece of fiction.

Blind Argus is no longer in print in this English edition, but second hand copies are available through the usual channels.