Discoveries: Is it spring? Time for books about Italy!

What Becomes

Stories

A.L. Kennedy

Alfred A. Knopf: 208 pp., $24.95

Nothing shines light on the darkest corners of human existence like icy British irony. A man makes soup for his wife’s dinner. He cuts himself and bleeds profusely. She comes home, hates him. He’s an idiot. She throws a potted herb (thyme) at him. “Thyme was quite hardy,” he thinks, “he thought it would weather the upset and come through fine in the end.” Characters here bleed frequently, unaware that they are bleeding. A.L. Kennedy has nothing but scorn for them -- losers embalmed in their thoughtlessness. Every little thing conspires in Kennedy’s darkness: “The house grew disturbed, doors pestering at their frames whenever the weather drew breath; clatters on the roof, something twisting, scouring overhead, and meanwhile she dreamed a little of being underwater.” Walls are the worst, complicit in their porosity. Through them, daughters hear fathers beating up mothers. In Kennedy’s fiction, humor often rises to hysteria. “All I do is laugh,” thinks one of these daughters, “which is making the sound of hurt things, who are trying not to be . . . dying things who are trying to bounce back, looking like a different actor so that everything goes on just as before.”

One More Story.

Thirteen Stories in

the Time-Honored Mode

Ingo Schulze

Alfred A. Knopf: 270 pp., $25.95

Ingo Schulze’s characters have one foot in East Germany and one foot on a banana peel. They struggle to maintain their dignity, their relationships, their sanity as history makes big and small decisions for them. Large ideas like fate and will are dismembered -- the parts scuttle off into the details of daily lives (grudges, petty annoyances, land mines). “I live in fear that I missed the one chance I had of breaking out of that moment,” thinks one character, after retelling the same story, “and that I am caught up in it now . . . for as long perhaps as it takes for a miracle to happen and, without a moment’s hesitation, for me to shout ‘Stop, stop, stop!’ ”

Every Day in Tuscany

Seasons of an Italian Life

Frances Mayes

Broadway Books: 306 pp., $25

Some people read detective stories to relax. Some read magazines. Some read books about Italy: Once you get over your petty jealousy, these books about moving to the place where slow, fine living was invented are almost as good as going there. The Italy books come in waves, usually beginning in April. The leader in this year’s crop is Frances Mayes, who along with Peter Mayle, the ex-ad exec you love to hate, started this “movement” by simply getting off a tourist bus at a house in Tuscany she couldn’t resist and staying there -- wow, you gotta love her. Mayes has more dreamy revelations in her 13th century house above Cortona, gets to know the “mountain people” and pretty unabashedly tells us how great her life is.

Joining Mayes on this spring’s Italian bookshelf is the forthcoming “Marcus of Umbria: What an Italian Dog Taught an American Girl About Love,” in which Justine van der Leun, zombie-like, leaves her life in New York for Collelungo where -- surprise! -- she meets a hunky farmer and cozies into an Umbrian village. In “Keeping the Feast: One Couple’s Story of Love, Food and Healing in Italy,” Paula Butturini and her husband, both foreign correspondents, fall in love and marry in Italy. They leave (bad idea) to report on the revolution in Romania, where Paula gets beaten in a riot and John is shot. They return to Italy to heal. This book, you can tell, is low on frivolity and high in ruminations on how good food and happiness fix things. It’s a genre, and the message is: Start packing.

Salter Reynolds is a writer in Los Angeles.