Renato (Michael) Amato died suddenly in Wellington four years ago, at 35. This volume of his short stories, prepared by his close friend Maurice Shadbolt, is his only full length publication, although many of the stories appeared previously in Mate, Landfall and Arena.

Shadbolt's selection follows a closely autobiographical vein, from the youth in his early teens taught up in the turmoil of war-torn Italy to the embittered intellectual in up country North Island forced to submit to the "Wop" and "Eye-tie" antagonism of New Zealand construction workers to the mellowed, domesticated graduate in Kelburn, Wellington, married and author of the beautiful "A Walk in the Shadows".

His first writing—in Italian—was as a destitute writer in Turin and Rome, friend of Gio Romanelli and Cesare Pavese and embittered by the monstrosities of war-time Italy. Written at this time was the tragic "Perspective", also published in the second volume of New Zealand Short Stories. Published in the World's Classic's series. Here too was the scene of "A Matter of Grammar", typifving the Italy he attempted to disown by coming to New Zealand. In "A Matter of Grammar"—written years later in New Zealand—Amato wrote of being forced to watch the execution of a band of Fascists he had fought with only 15 days before:

Aftermath Of Turmoil.

"If—as a young friend of mine would state, who must have been just born when all this happened—it did not sound like 'crap', I would say that on that day I died. I died with them, because they were the Italy I knew, the only possible Italy that could exist."

Amato the author and Amato the man probably never covered from the turmoil of his adolescence. The latter was left bitter and uncertain, the former too coldly objective, soon to dry up altogether.

And then, closer to home, there are the savagely objective "One of the Titans" and "The New, New ...".

Here is a scathing indictment of the pedestalled average Kiwi, so self consciously studied in New Zealand writing, by an Italian of sensitivity thrown into the mill of construction work in the central North Island, among New Zealanders who had fought the "Wops" and the "Eye-ties" in the Second World War and now treated them accordingly. When in "The New, New . . ." the new immigrant is confronted in the street by a hostile New Zealander Amato's thoughts are almost morbidly sarcastic; "And he understood also how his accent, his odd way of saying words, must sound disagreeable to the musical ears of these nice folks, of this nice man who had stopped him in the street with an obvious desire to be friendly and helpful."

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.