TOMMASO AND THE BLIND PHOTOGRAPHER

Published shortly after its Italian author's death in 1996, this clever story (which follows into English translation Bufalino's The Keeper of Ruins and The Plague-Spreader's Tale) represents the musings of its eponymous narrator, a former journalist who's become a "Voluntary Trappist and general factotum in a block of flats" still under construction. Tommaso joins his photographer friend Tir (so nicknamed for Tiresias, Sophocles' blind seer) in meditative observations of the landlocked ship of fools that their errant neighbors comprise, in a wistfully amusing tale that's equal parts love story, murder mystery, and gentle parody—of social and criminal organizations, the limitations and pleasures of voyeurism, and the infuriating haphazardness of writers' runaway imaginations. A terrific little novel.