Giuseppe Bonaviri is one of the foremost Italian writers of the second half of the twentieth century; his opus is so extensive and impressive that in recent years he has often been mentioned as a possible candidate for the Nobel Prize for literature. Primarily a novelist, Bonaviri also writes poetry and short fiction of remarkable originality. He has published a play and a volume of literary criticism and is a frequent contributor to the literary pages of newspapers and magazines; in fact, there is hardly a literary genre that has not engaged this unique writer.

Bonaviri's masterpieces belong to the middle period of his creative activity, beginning with La divina foresta (1969) and including Notti sull'altura (1971), Dolcissimo (1978), and Novelle saracene (1980). These works embody a complex and original view of reality, a new cosmology, a new anthropology. It is neither the animistic, pantheistic vision of Bonaviri's Sicilian ancestry nor the...