Clay Creatures

This slim volume, a Spring Selection of the Sons of Italy Book Club, gives the reader "two for the price of one"—two intriguing short stories set in Sicily whose characters face an absurd dilemma: "The Jar" (La Giara ) by the Nobel-prize winning author Luigi Pirandello (1867-1936) and "The Urn" by acclaimed contemporary writer Mark Ciabattari, author of the novels "Dreams of an Imaginary New Yorker Named Rizzoli" (Dutton/Obelisk) and "The Literal Truth" (Canio's Editions) followed Rizzoli, an urban everyman adrift in contemporary New York. "The Urn," Ciabattari’s novella-length story of the peasant Grimaldi’s nightmarish fall from grace, takes place in the beautiful seaside village of Taormina in Sicily in 1895. "Ciabattari’s Clay Creatures, with its two stories—‘The Urn’ by Mark Ciabattari and ‘The Jar’ by Luigi Pirandello—is a postmodern homage to the great Italian modernist Pirandello. It should be read not only in the American literary tradition made by the likes of Paul Auster, Donald Barthelme, Philip K. Dick and Kurt Vonnegut, but also in the Italian tradition of writers like Italo Calvino. This book transcends American and Italian to become Italian American."—Fred Gardaphe, director, Italian American Studies, State University of New York at Stony Brook. The critic Fred Gardaphe will do a presentation on Pirandello & Ciabattari at the Modern Language Association convention. December 2004 Presented in the form of a found journal, "The Urn" follows the misfortunes of Grimaldi from the day his every movement is shadowed by a giant urn that moves about on feet of hard clay. Grimaldi is a brick maker, who is unable to read or write, and more like than unlike most of his contemporaries. This ordinary worker becomes a "freak" as people begin to reason why this urn follows him about. Explanations range from thievery, to magic, curses, science, to the supernatural, but none satisfy everyone. Such things were said to have occurred during the Middle Ages. Essentially, the normal becomes abnormal. A friend is turned into a freak. Destiny rules, but is defied. As the strange urn becomes familiar, the abnormal eventually becomes normal, and the urn becomes a friend, moving from the strange to the familiar requiring new interpretations: Perhaps it is "the soul of a child who died before baptism!" When the authorities get involved, we see how dangerous power can rea! lly be. When things finally fall into place, we learn that reality gets squashed, repressed, eliminated, and eventually hidden, only to be recovered by a later generation who can no longer can tell the difference between truth and lies--and no longer cares. Like the jar with feet that follows Grimaldi, Luigi Pirandello shadows writers like Ciabattari. "The Urn" refers to and expands upon Pirandello’s classic, "The Jar," a story memorized by every Sicilian schoolchild, a story that has inspired a play, an opera, a section of a film ("Kaos" by the Taviani Brothers) and at least one restaurant. Here, this comic tale of the avaricious farmer and the old jar mender who rivets himself up in a jar he is repairing, creating an absurd dilemma, appears in a fresh contemporary translation by Maria Enrico. Together, these "clay creatures" provide a cross-cultural and cross-generational look at Italian and Italian American writing.