From The Bewitched Bourgeois, which will be published next month by New York Review Books. Translated from the Italian by Lawrence Venuti.

One morning, the noted painter Lucio Predonzani, forty-six, who had long ago retired to his country house in Vimercate, was stunned. He had opened the daily newspaper and, on the four-column page of the Arts section, in the lower right-hand corner, came across the headline:

italian art world in mourning

painter predonzani is dead

Underneath it read:

Vimercate, February 21, night. Following a brief illness,…