Gloriously Mundane

At this time, although few of the stories indicate it, Amato was in despair, torn between the life he had hoped for, the New Zealanders he had met and, paradoxically, the Italy he had voluntarily left behind. He stopped writing completely, became a travelling salesman in linen. The introspective "Nothings" has a helpless, resigned quality, giving no hint of the more moderate, more settled Amato that was to come.

For Amato chanced. Married, living in Kelburn and completing an arts degree at Victoria, he started to write again. Indeed many of the stories in this volume, so intensely auto-biographical that most can be related to a specific period in his too-short life, were written at this time, sometimes translations from the original Italian. In "Bargains" and "A Walk in the Shadows", the latter the last words he ever wrote, there is little sign of the embittered hedonist of the previous four years. "Bargains" is "suburban", gloriously mundane in every personal detail, while in the dreamlike "A Walk in the Shadows" Amato seems to have found a quality of expression somehow-lacking in some of the lesser stories in this volume. And, tragically, this was the final effort. In April 1964 he died suddenly of a cerebral haemorhage, only 35:

"It is a beautiful hill; it is a beautiful day, but it is always as it has been. I am so short of time."

The Full Circle Of The Travelling Cuckoo, by Renato Amato. Whitcombe and Tombs. $1.90. Reviewed by Geoff. Walker.