The Chill

A teenager in 1920s Tuscany slowly realizes the callousness of humanity in this first English translation of Bilenchi's (1909–1989) haunting novella. The nameless narrator watches his family's powerlessness in the wake of a drought, hard financial times and nasty neighborhood gossip. After the drought, the boy is unnerved by his grandfather's apparent dementia, and his suspicions that all relationships are tenuous are confirmed when he loses friends over trivial matters. But then an irreconcilable rift occurs between the narrator and his best friend, and the story gains momentum. The focus shifts from descriptions of the Tuscan countryside to appropriately jarring accounts of the boy's sexual awakening, the most disturbing of which involves Gino, a farmer's son who preys on young women in a sunflower field. The narrator is both interested and repelled by sex, but it's not until he stays with a group of family friends, who recount abortions and unhappy marriages, that he truly understands that his innocence is gone. Goldstein, an editor at the New Yorker , beautifully translates this timeless tale of discomfort, rejection and isolation. (Nov.)