[In the review below, Signorelli-Pappas comments favorably on Il cardillo addolorato, praising Ortese's interweaving of fantastic and realistic elements.]

In Anna Maria Ortese's strange, haunting novel Il cardillo addolorato three high-spirited gentlemen—a prince, a sculptor, and a merchant—undertake a journey at the end of the eighteenth century from Northern Europe south to Naples to pay a business call on a glovemaker, Mariano Civile. They also hope to satisfy their curiosity about stories they have heard regarding Civile's beautiful but inexplicably silent daughter Elmena. From the moment they arrive in Naples, they find themselves inhabiting an unsettling intersection between the fantastic and the real in what becomes a tale of magic realism that has the intricate plot turns and the disarming inventive force of Ortese's earlier novel, L'iguana (1965).

Like the maiden iguana Estrellita, the character of Elmena alternately evokes responses of enchantment, censure, and a deepening delusion from the three men, who quickly fall in love and find themselves in helpless competition for her attention. Although the sculptor Dupré finally succeeds in winning her hand, it is the prince, Neville, who is the most thoroughly beguiled by the secrets of her mysterious past, and he embarks on a quest to unravel them. What he enters, however, is nothing less than a labyrinth in which each new revelation interweaves with another, more unpredictable one, as the contours of this elusive story continue to expand, vanish, and reappear in the manner of a waking dream.

The metaphoric centerpiece of the novel is the mournful, enigmatic cry of the cardillo, whose hallucinatory presence keeps intervening and whose song alternates between ecstasy and despair. What role the pet bird actually played in the Civile family chronicle remains deliberately obscure, as each successive version of the tiny creature's death and rebirth condenses only to fade into another. The bird's voice of pain does, however, manage to transform the prince's sensibility in a way that endures. Neville muses that the voice, "rising from desire and a general dream of good, is not a bird's voice…. It creates both tears and virtuous acts." Like Elmena, he comes to realize that he too "lives under the influence of a duty that is a dream." The cardillo becomes his melancholy muse, empowering him to reclaim his own artistic essence and to weave the separate threads of Elmena's story, as the novel concludes, into the concentrated unity of a poem.