Masters of Two Arts: Re-Creation of European Literatures in Italian Cinema by Carlo Testa (review)

MLRy ioo.i, 2005 235 pronouns. Bartoloni effectivelydelineates the space 'in-between' of poetry which can only allude to a journey suspended in time and space, a space of non-action necessitating an exploration of potentiality. The interstitial literary experience in Caproni's writing is thus one of living in the presence of the unrepresentable, embracing exis? tence in the space of potentiality and waiting. In the case of Sereni's Diario d'Algeria, his imprisonment in a prisoner-of-war camp, accompanied by the loss of language that this entails, is the interstitiality of exile which continues to be reflected in much of Sereni's later poetry. Where movement towards a destination is problematized, and the writer's experience is one of spacelessness and timelessness, the memories of the past and potentiality of the future create an interstitial zone mirrored in both the language and style of Sereni's work. Chapter 4 acts as an excellent conclusion to the work, bringing together and clarifying many of the previous points very well. Bartoloni highlights the contrasting approaches ofthe writers examined and the main themes and aspects of interstitiality in the specific works considered here. This chapter concludes with a section dedicated to each author individually. For Calvino's Palomar interstitialityis not articulated by narrating the space in-between destinations, for there is a total lack of motion be? tween spaces, but rather when observations focus on the 'other' and its potential significance. In contrast, the anonymous first-person traveller-narrator of much of Caproni's poetry is in permanent transit to an unknown destination, and therefore the narration of the experience of being in-between, in the zone of interstitiality,is all-important here. In the case of Svevo, the two literary enclosures in La coscienza di Zeno's multilayered narrative are viewed from the perspective of interstitiality,while for Sereni language, repeating, trapping, and forbidding progress, constructs an in? terstitial time in its insistence on the now. This is a scholarly and finelywritten book which deserves fewer of the rather fre? quent, and occasionally unfortunate, spelling mistakes (Clavino for Calvino (p. 35)). However, this is a minor point, since Interstitial Writing must now rank as an obligatory starting-point foranyone concerned with the notions and theories of intersti? tiality,and is a significant contribution to the fields of the Italian authors studied. University of Exeter Lucie Benchouiha Masters of Two Arts: Re-Creation of European Literatures in ltalian Cinema. By Carlo Testa. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2002. viii 4-366 pp. ?42 (pbk ?18). ISBN 0-8020-3640-6 (pbk 0-8020-8475-3). The distinctive quality of this book is the clarity with which Carlo Testa focuses on the interaction between literature and cinema and how this is regulated by their relationship to society. Thus he argues that film adaptations of literary works are as much influenced by the pressure of cultural and political debates as cinema is by his? torical events. This is why Testa appropriately makes reference to Dudley Andrew's suggestion that scholars and critics of both literary and film studies should take a sociological approach instead of being lured by Metz's cryptic semiological theories, which, unfortunately, often alienate students. A film-maker's decision to make a film adaptation of a novel in a particular period is as much related to the historical, political, and cultural context of the time as a filmwhich reconstructs a particular historical or political event of an either recent or distant past. In other words, we could confidently maintain that Sense and Sensibility tells us more about our late twentieth-century perception of early nineteenth-century England (through the filterof a film-maker from the Far East, Ang Lee, who has found his own style in the western cultural world) than it does about Jane Austen's England or, indeed, about her novel itself. 236 Reviews Before examining some case studies, Testa seeks firstof all to finda new definition of the relationship between cinema and literature in order to point a way to a critical method more productive than those proposed by earlier scholars. For instance, he does not like old terms such as 'adaptation' or riduzione...

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