The Great Bear

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Ginevra Bompiani's fiction could be compared to certain figurations of Sleep. The landscape created by her prose recalls paintings in which peaceful figures sleep in a quiet wood, in a solitary house — any place where the senses can dim and reason's guard is dropped. These are places where nothing seems to happen but which open onto a dream's thousand possibilities. It is precisely into that borderland — where reason dozes off and makes room for myths, fables, and dreams — that Ginevra Bompiani’s prose ventures.

Bompiani has been compared to Calvino. Both share a style that combines philosophical intent with modes of fantasy, a “Mythical Realism” that uses fairy-tale and mythical tropes to express the discrepancies in everyday reality. Here the old gods of the sky can teach us how much our world is haunted by a total absence of spirit.

GINEVRA BOMPIANI was born in Milan and teaches Comparative Literature at the University of Siena.

She is the author of several works of Bartelemi all'ombra , Le specie del sonno , Mondanità , L'incantato , Vecchio cielo, nuova terra , and L'orso maggiore , most of which have been translated into Les règnes du sommeil , L'Etourdi , Ciel ancien, terre nouvelle , and Le Grand Ours . Vecchio cielo, nuova terra has also appeared in a Spanish translation in 1994 .

Ginevra Bompiani is also the author of two children's books, Via terra and L'amorosa avventura di una pelliccia e di un'armatura . She is well known for her literary criticism as well. Among her essays are Lo spazio narrante , L'attesa , and Tempora .