Gesualdo Bufalino became an overnight success when at the age of sixty he published his first novel, Diceria dell'untore (1981; translated as The Plague-Sower, 1988). The novel, one of the masterpieces of twentieth-century Italian fiction, won the prestigious Campiello Prize in 1981. After his sensational appearance on the Italian literary scene, Bufalino became a prolific writer, publishing novels, prose pieces, some poetry, many introductions to the works of others, and translations of French authors.

Bufalino writes from a stance of cosmic pointlessness, a position that reminds one of other great pessimists such as Giacomo Leopardi and Luigi Pirandello. He shares their fatalistic view of life and, paradoxically, their strong creative urge. His fiction bears witness to the ethos of restlessness, ambiguity, and the sense of exhaustion typical of postmodern art. It is precisely his identification with the indecisive postmodernist self that separates Bufalino from a great modernist writer such as Marcel...