[In the mixed review below, Hampton comments on Ortese's concern with loss and the past in the stories collected in A Music behind the Wall.]

Anna Maria Ortese's Music Behind the Wall, the first of two projected volumes from 50 years of her writing, is less a collection of stories than of ruminations and reveries by largely unnamed narrators. There are few actual characters beyond those conjured by the narrators' imaginations. In one tale, a woman has relationships with a light and with a plant she sees from her window. In another, the heroine falls asleep while waiting for the plumbers, and a Persian fable invades her dreams. Yet another seriously considers the notion that the past actually exists as a submerged continent. The best of the 10 stories explore the real loss that time can bring—a woman remembering a youthful love who always arrived at a certain hour, a young wife who rejected the friendship of a waitress in a cafe, a woman recalling a kind tenant at her grandmother's house when she was a child. Ms. Ortese, who is known here for her novel The Iguana, is an observant writer, and there are phrases in Henry Martin's affectionate translation that enliven even the dullest passage (a woman, for example, describes her wardrobe as being "consecrated by poverty and bad taste"). But through most of these stories, one keeps turning pages without seeming to get anywhere.