[Martin has translated some of Ortese's work into English. In the essay below, he comments on the major themes and ideas that inform Ortese's fiction.]

Anna Maria Ortese's first volume of shorter fictions, Angelici dolori, appeared in 1937, her seventh and most recent, In sonno e in veglia, in 1987. The present collection of her stories in English translation [A Music behind the Wall] ranges through the whole of these fifty years and touches nearly all the modes of storytelling which have characterized her creative life. The early work was once described as "magical realism." The middle period of work made that somewhat cumbersome adjective recede. The recent work lies at the edges of fable. Or perhaps it suggests the existence of a genre of "metafable" in which one listens to an otherworldly tale while casting a vigilant, questioning eye about the room in which it is being told. Rooms and houses are highly vital themes in Ortese's writing.

Anna Maria Ortese has remarked that her work is always and exclusively concerned with the inner life, and her stories most typically present us with moments in which the inner life might be said to readjust or realign itself, redefining its rights and prerogatives, reasserting its needs, reestablishing its proper scope—its sense of itself as a no less groundless than necessary function. This inner life with which the author deals is a complex world of thought, speculation and intuition, no less than of feeling and fantasy, and it touches dimensions that are more than simply personal. These stories, indeed, have little to do with psychology, since the psyche itself is the hero, focus or guiding principle of psychological narrative, whereas here the psyche is simply one force among many. Each of these stories is a place in which various realities manage to meet, or they concern themselves with voices and characters on whom such various realities converge. These realities themselves are the stories' truest protagonists. The psyche is simply the field, albeit an active field, in which their conjunctions and oppositions come momentarily into view.

Many of these stories have appeared on various occasions. In addition to presenting new stories, each of Ortese's collections of shorter fictions has furnished an occasion for the reappearance of previously published work. The author has a way of insisting on the continuity—even perhaps the simultaneity—of her present and her past. For example, one of the more recent stories in this present collection, "The Submerged Continent," seems to craft an emblematic bond between apparently different modes of relating to the self and the world: the deft and energetic thinking of the introduction and conclusion encircles and protects a much more ingenuous reverie which re-evokes the breathlessness of the author's earliest work. The narrative presents itself as a philosophical reflection on a dream, but it also engages the theme of "the ages of man," and its strategy for doing so lies partly in deploying its own internal moods and styles as elements of a startling yet self-evident continuum. This story is in some ways reminiscent of the author's most curious and sui generis novel, Il porto di Toledo, which was published in the early 1970s. Il porto di Toledo re-appropriated the stories of Angelici dolori and used them as elements of a fictional investigation into the life of the girl who had written them some forty years previously. The author's vision of the inner life is both dynamic and conservative. Nothing can be taken for granted, and nothing can be overlooked.

Ortese once wrote that her work can be seen as falling into two basic categories: the callow and the unfashionable. Those words sound barbed and inauspicious, but so purposely so as finally to remind us of a more serene statement by Tommaso Landolfi: that literature starts where literature stops. This, perhaps, is the greatest of the great romantic longings which have survived into the modern age. Anna Maria Ortese's goal, as voiced in one of her stories, is to reach and explore those "regions of the soul where everything impossible in fact takes place," and no secondary description of what and how she writes, even if quipped by the author herself, can be anything more than secondary. Yet wherever she goes is a place from which she always returns: each of these stories is a roundtrip ticket from a here to a there (an extraordinary there) and back again to here—but always with a difference, a loss of ignorance and innocence; or through their loss the rediscovery of the greater innocence of a greater openness to experience.