Reading Elspeth Davie's stories and novels is like visiting a retrospective exhibition of paintings or drawings by the Bolognese artist Giorgio Morandi: in both cases the dominant impression is of sameness combined with variation, familiarity allied to strangeness; with Morandi it is simple household objects, with Davie it is commonplace settings and situations that come to be invested with symbolic and metaphysical meanings. It is not known whether Davie - a teacher and connoisseur of art, as any reader could surmise even in the absence of biographical dat - ever came across and liked Morandi's paintings, nor is it meant to suggest that he inspired her to write the way she did. However, an interesting affinity can be found between her aesthetic approach to reality and Morandi's peculiar blend of abstractism and realism. Wandering through a Morandi exhibition one sees on all sides homely shapes like vases, glasses, jars, and especially his celebrated bottles: squat or slim, lying or standing, isolated, grouped or scattered, their smooth rounded shapes, suffused with a mellow light that becomes one substance with their subdued colours, emanate an austere, contemplative stillness, like the pictures of a secularised, twentiethcentury Piero della Francesca who had exchanged his Christs and Madonnas for these humbler still-life forms, carved, as it were, out of condensed light. A similar contemplative stillness emanates from the fiction of our author, the result in part of the repetition of themes and structures, characters and situations, in part of a style whose rhythm is rather one of articulate musing than of spoken language. Davie's austerely undramatic settings and unrealistic-sounding conversations, like Morandi's homely objects and Piero's ecstatically rigid angels and saints, deliberately give up all effort toward referential liveliness lest the viewer, concentrating on that, should miss the underlying meaning; they function as containers - bottles, indeed - for the refined essences that are distilled from the writer's deep sense of the emotional malaise of contemporary Western humanity, tom between the torment of self-repression and a naive or reckless striving after the impossibly elusive ideal of interpersonal communication.