The Great Bear

Ginevra Bompiani's fiction could be compared to certain figurations of Sleep. The landscape created by her prose recalls paintings in which peaceful figures sleep in a quiet wood, in a solitary house — any place where the senses can dim and reason's guard is dropped. These are places where nothing seems to happen but which open onto a dream's thousand possibilities. It is precisely into that borderland — where reason dozes off and makes room for myths, fables, and dreams — that Ginevra Bompiani’s prose ventures.Bompiani has been compared to Calvino. Both share a style that combines philosophical intent with modes of fantasy, a “Mythical Realism” that uses fairy-tale and mythical tropes to express the discrepancies in everyday reality. Here the old gods of the sky can teach us how much our world is haunted by a total absence of spirit.GINEVRA BOMPIANI was born in Milan and teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Siena.She is the author of several works of Bartelemi all'ombra ( Mondadori, 1967), Le specie del sonno ( Ricci, 1975; Quodlibet, 1998), Mondanità ( La Tartaruga, 1980), L'incantato ( Garzanti, 1987), Vecchio cielo, nuova terra ( Garzanti, 1988), and L'orso maggiore ( Anabasi, 1994), most of which have been translated into Les règnes du sommeil ( Verdier, 1986), L'Etourdi ( Gallimard, 1989), Ciel ancien, terre nouvelle ( Gallimard, 1990), and Le Grand Ours ( Stock, 1995). Vecchio cielo, nuova terra has also appeared in a Spanish translation in 1994 (Viejo cielo, nueva tierra. Lumen, 1994).Ginevra Bompiani is also the author of two children's books, Via terra ( Einaudi, 1994) and L'amorosa avventura di una pelliccia e di un'armatura ( Sellerio, 2000). She is well known for her literary criticism as well. Among her essays are Lo spazio narrante ( La Tartaruga, 1978), L'attesa ( Feltrinelli, 1988), and Tempora ( Anabasi, 1993).