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.