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Sometimes farcical, and sometimes weighted with tragic irony, these stories show man forever recoiling from the world into his cramped visions of self. Landolfi himself seems to be a master of the art. A resident of San Remo, he lives in seclusion with his wife and two daughters, appears in public only to gamble at the tables at the local casino. Characteristically, he has authorized only one photograph for publication—a head shot, with his outspread hand masking his face. At 55, he is highly Prized in Italian literary circles but almost unknown to the general public. Perhaps the most admired of his works is Rien Va, an imaginary diary in which he probes the struggles of one lonely, lost, defiant man in an incomprehensible universe. He is now at work on a novel consisting of a dialogue between a terrestrial creature and an immortal one, but he is not sure that he will finish it. "I don't know how to get out of it," says Landolfi. "It's ignoble."