[In the following review of L'alone grigio, the critic discusses the style and tone of Ortese's writing.]

Anna Maria Ortese has an extraordinary presence, one that glows through everything she writes and turns everyday subjects into festive ones. More than a style, it is a case of personality; indeed, the style as such is transparent, a limpid, unaffected, one might almost say un-Italian means of expression—un-Italian at least in its apparently artless air of plain speaking, its total lack of rhetoric. Seldom does a writer make so personal and immediate an impact, so almost idiosyncratic and private an effect. Ortese readers may feel they are eavesdropping on some sad (yet on the surface often cheerful) soliloquy; or else involved in a tête-à-tête, a special encounter, admitted to a secret world of fantasy, a very human and unpretentious yet luminous world in which souls rather than social beings communicate, one in which common things become strangely important and ordinary moments precious and therefore vulnerable.

It is a fragile rather than a strictly feminine world; in fact it lacks the solidity most women give their surroundings, and their preoccupation with facts and detail. Realism and fantasy interweave so completely that a book like L'Iguana, which is pure fantasy—mythical animals and places and events—is atmospherically very close to a realistic novel like the Strega prizewinner Poveri e semplici, which deals with the lives of a group of young people. Signorina Ortese seems as solidly at home in fantasy as in reality, and able to shift without strain from one to the other. Even her journalism and fiction overlap in a similar way, a descriptive article, for instance, being transformed by the feeling, subjective vision one generally associates with imaginative writing; by the intuitive flash. The fact that she generally uses a first-person narrative adds to the strong sense of unity in all she writes, the feeling of a world whose circumstances may change but whose centre remains constant.

L'alone grigio consists of short stories published over many years and collected for the first time. Stories? Even at their most fabulous they read like reminiscences, like things solidly (though not solemnly) remembered things that may have happened in dreams but were lived through, and that once again show how fantasy to Signorina Ortese is not an escape from reality but an extension of it, a new dimension to explore. Among them there is every kind of genre but a single voice; science fiction of a kind, Kafkaesque fantasy of another sort, stories that read like fragments of autobiography but may not be so, descriptive reporting that again may be autobiography or fantasy or both, and nostalgic pieces that seem to suggest longing of a spiritual rather than material or even emotional sort. "È lunga la strada per giungere a Tipperary, È lunga la strada per arrivare": in one of the stories the banal, disconcertingly translated words, sung by the narrator's father, are used to conjure some paradisal state of mind, a Tipperary that never was but needs to be, the other (Ortese) world beyond this one, apprehended intensely by a poet who happens to write prose.