Voices from the Plains

Gianni Celati, trans. Robert Lumley

The Commuter Children Who Got Lost is a sad, uncertain story. Everything is vague. Even the children’s ages are vague. (“She was about thirteen and he was about eleven.”) They’re sick of boring, stupid adults, and wander around the city trying to find someone who isn’t like that. They keep being disappointed, until they find someone even more vague than them (“…the helpers saw that the name on the bell in Staircase 38 did not correspond to that of the woman. So everyone started to drift off…”) and everything slowly goes white.

Time Passing is a story about silence and time. A nameless woman notices different types of silence. She realises that “time is just time.” Things feel empty and aimless. So much time and silence that it becomes too loud and there’s no time at all.

I don’t know how to feel about Out in the Open. Maybe it’s meant to make you feel exposed. Less than three pages, but so many moments where your perspective changes. I agree that “everything looks different when you feel yourself to be out in the open, when you stop believing you can hide somewhere and be safe.”

One Evening Before the End of the World is like a sad urban legend. The end of the world can mean a lot of different things.

A Japanese Girl is disappointing, but I like this line: “At night from her windows it was possible to see the headlights of the cars going along the freeway at the foot of the hills, while beyond that lay an endless city, few of whose streets were known to the girl, or to myself or anyone else.”

Ghosts at Borgaforte is another story that feels like an urban legend. It’s about a vanishing hitch-hiker type of haunting. Two women give a lift to a child who isn’t wet, despite the rain. (“When the woman asked why it was they’d never seen him around, he replied he didn’t know.”) This story and The Girl from Sermide mention something called a floating bridge. Don’t know what that is, but I like to picture it as a bridge not connected to anything, literally floating in the sky.