FICTION

PASSION by I.U. Tarchetti (Mercury House: $12.95, paperback original; 214 pp.) Tarchetti, writing in the mid 1800s, was a member of a group of painters, composers and writers called the scapigliati, a group whose guiding principle was the rejection of bourgeois values and respectable behavior. “Passion” (titled “Fosca”) was written in 1869, the year of Tarchetti’s death at twenty-nine of tuberculosis and typhus. The story, in which Gorgio, a young military officer on leave in Milan falls in love with Clara, a beautiful, robust, happy but distracted married woman, and is then transferred to Parma, where he becomes obsessed (half love and half death) with Fosca, his colonel’s depressed, hysterical, extremely intelligent and very ugly cousin, is almost completely autobiographical. It is a feverish libretto of a book, in which the greatness of one’s soul is measured by the ability to love and hate absolutely. In 1971, Italo Calvino included the book in a series he was editing for an Italian publisher. In 1981, an Italian film was made of the story, and Stephen Sondheim and James Lapine have just adapted the book to the American musical theatre. Choose your medium. Have something cold on hand to drink.