Italo Calvino Books

Actually, 3.5 stars. I am a hard critic. But any reader will like Italo Calvino's intellectual feat. What a gift he has for words! I regret I didn't have pad and pen on hand to jot down opportunities to expand my vocabulary. Don't make the same mistake.

Italo Calvino's ability to use language can be a mind-blowing experience for any reader. This is the first work of his that I read. The idea---interspersing 10 stories with a tale of the reader of these stories---is very unique. But as the book goes on, I find less creativity. The intimacy with Calvino I found after the first story is something I was deeply looking for much later into the book. Instead the reader's story there is barely different from the stories he reads. I admit that I may be the obstacle. I DO recommend the work, and guarantee that you will be touched by a creative mind who brings you to all possible corners of the experience of reading, and has much to teach us. I look forward to his "Italian Folktales".

Read carefully and you'll find that you are traveling -- Calvino takes you for a ride in this one. It's fun and intellectual. And Calvino is a master at the art of telling a good story.

One definition of metafiction is "Fiction that deals, often playfully and self-referentially, with the writing of fiction or its conventions." That could pretty much describe Italo Calvino's "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler," a gloriously surreal story about the hunt for a mysterious book.

A reader opens Italo Calvino's latest novel, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveller," only to have the story cut short. Turns out it was a defective copy, with another book's pages inside. But as the reader tries to find out what book the defective pages belong to, he keeps running into even more books and more difficulties -- as well as the beautiful Ludmilla, a fellow reader who also received a defective book.

With Ludmilla assisting him (and, he hopes, going to date him), the reader then explores obscure dead languages, publishers' shops, bizarre translators and various other obstacles. All he wants is to read an intriguing book. But he keeps stumbling into tales of murder and sorrow, annoying professors, and the occasional radical feminist -- and a strange literary conspiracy. Will he ever finish the book?

In its own way, "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler" is a mystery story, a satire, a romance, and a treasure hunt. Any book whose first chapter explains how you're supposed to read it has got to be a winner -- "You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino's new novel, "If On A Winter's Night a Traveler." Relax. Concentrate." And so on, with Calvino gently joking and chiding the reader before actually beginning his strange little tale.

As cute as that first chapter is, it also sets the tone for this strange, funny metafictional tale, which not only inserts Calvino but the reader. That's right -- this book is written in the second person, with the reader as the main character. "You did this" and "you did that," and so on. Only a few authors are brave enough to insert the reader... especially in a novel about a novel that contains other novels. It seems like a subtle undermining of reality itself.

It's a bit disorienting when Calvino inserts chapters from the various books that "you" unearth -- including ghosts, hidden identities, Mexican duels, Japanese erotica, and others written in the required styles. Including some cultures that he made up. Upon further reading, those isolated chapters reveal themselves to be almost as intriguing as the literary hunt. Especially since each one cuts off at the most suspenseful moment -- what happens next? Nobody knows!

It all sounds hideously confusing, but Calvino's deft touch and sense of humor keep it from getting too weird. There are moments of wink-nudge comedy, as well as the occasional poke at the publishing industry. But Calvino also provides chilling moments, mildly sexy ones, and a tone of mystery hangs over the whole novel.

At times it feels like Calvino is in charge of "If On A Winter's Night A Traveler"... and at other times, it feels like "you" are the one at the wheel. Just don't put this in the stack of Books You Mean To Read But There Are Others You Must Read First. Pure literary genius.

Has the book you're holding really been written by the author mentioned on the cover? We readers rarely ask ourselves this question but in Mr Calvino's novel, even this simple assumption is questioned. The story is quite confusing indeed because nothing is as it appears.
But apart from the plot, Mr Calvino reflects on interesting topics which in my view save the book. For instance the reader's dilemma of choosing the appropriate novel among the thousand existing publications, the required ingredients to create suspense in a plot, the fact that books are easily defined entities which can be enjoyed without risks compared to the elusive quality of real-life existence, the pleasure of using a paper knife as the reader cuts his way through a novel or the problem posed by someone reading a text which may impose an undesirable pace on the listener. The author also casts a critical glance at universities as literary institutions which have forgotten that literature can be enjoyed in a natural, innocent and primitive way without having to be lacerated by intellectual analysis.

Italo Calvino has surpassed himself. He has taken the "relating to the character" feeling to new heights, by making everyone who picks this books up, a character of the book. He takes you to the edge around 10 odd times, in 100 beginning sof 10 unrelated stories, but holds you back from plunging into the story line. He gets you so frustrated...no thts not the word...mmm ok I will use the word, but with no negative connotation...He pulls the ground from under you with every turn of the page. A must read for anyone passionate about reading for reading's sake.

A fascinating tale of compassion and dispair in the postwar picaresque tradition of writers like Gunther Grass.
Told from the perspective of the boy, Pin, Calvino's vision is fresh and imaginative. The tale invites us to understand the resistance movement as one not only of bravery, but of anxious restlessness and chaos. Through the commander Kim, we see war--on either side--as the defense of the humiliated against their aggressors. No one is spared. In this, we see a bit of ourselves and the current political arena in Washington and Iraq.

This is an absolutely wonderful novel about a boy who wanders into the Italian resistance during WWII. There, he finds a hilarious panoplie of characters, from lice-infested peasant marxists to the hyper-intellectual young co-leader. Each person is rendered so vividly - and if you have ever lived in Italy you recognise the types - that the novel is extremely dense and pleasureful.

The plot is fairly simple: a young boy from a chaotic household has to flee after being arrested for stealing a pistol from his sister's German "client." (He was trying to impress the ineffectual drunks in his usual hangout, a smoky and dilapidated bar, and then gets caught up in the resistance.) All the time, he is lonely and desperately seeking a special companion, someone to love and take care of him. It is not a heroic tale, but one about what it was really like in the resistance: more about the pauses and boredom, the bad food and promiscuity, the strange thoughts by men risking their lives for murky as well as clear-cut causes - the socialist revolution or to rid their countryside of the Germans who steal their cows. This is a new and fascinating view, told with great wit and style. This is the first novel I read in Italian, and its vocabulary is difficult but wonderfully succinct and clear.

Warmly recommended.

I looked for this book for years after reading about it in a Gore Vidal essay I believe. Finally I noticed it was in print again and so I at last read it. This may not be Calvino's best to Calvino fans but to those of us who aren't particular fans of the Calvino style this is his first book and so the style isn't altogether there yet. To me that is a good thing. As artists become masters of their craft they begin to control their material to such an extent that nothing is left to chance. The charm of this book is that Calvino is not in complete command and so the book has a kind of raw innocence very suitable to its subject matter(WWII Italy) and lead character(a child). This is a very earthy book and that word does not apply to later Calvino. All the stuff is here that will later appear in more perfect form, but for this material he is in just the right form.

Experimental, historical, cynical, considerably meditative, innocently gloomy, and yet, as the author indicated, exaggerated, distorted.

It is a hightly sophisticated first try, but as most first novels do, its narrative style lacks the harmony and refinement that the author has worked on in his later career.

Calvino's first novel is loosely based on his experiences as a young partisan during WWII. The overriding purpose seems to be to explode the myth behind the all-too-human countrymen who fought in the resistance. Rather than glamorize them as heroes, as had been done in countless books and tales of the period, Calvino takes great pains to show just how foolish, short-sighted and pathetic many of these men really were. Even harsher is his portrayal of the windbags in the barroom, who are quick to egg others on to action, but prove unwilling to take any such risks themselves. Of course he saves what is perhaps the very harshest criticism for his fictional sister - who is literally in bed with the enemy - and himself - in the person of the lonely street urchin Pin, who like the sister, is desperate to fit in anywhere with anyone at any price.

While this all may sound rather heavy and depressing, the viewpoint of the young lad gives it all a fresh and essentially non-judgmental veneer. Think of "The Wonder Years", only focusing on a homeless boy growing up under fascist rule. The characters are skillfully sketched, although hardly people one would care to know, and while the plot is not overburdened with action for a war novel, things move along a fair pace.

Calvino is best known for his technical fireworks, and while there are one or two spots where we see him developing these skills, for the most part the story is told in a very straightforward, chronological fashion. So Calvino's fans, who likely start each of his novels expecting a book unlike any they've ever read, may be disappointed at how pedestrian an approach the master takes to telling this story. On the other hand, readers who find Calvino's novels "too bizarre" may find this one surprisingly palatable, or at least comprehensible.

the notion of remembering back to when we were all dry inside and it was wet outside, before we turned ourselves inside out and carried the wet within us in a dry world is enough to recommend this book to any and all - the bit about how birds got in the world is icing on the cake.

Qfwfqu, an immortal being, guides the reader through the evolution of Earth. Highly repetetive with no character action.

To the people who hate this book, I grant you the freedom of your opinion, but I have to say, "You don't get it!" This isn't a narrative in the traditional sense of the word. Instead, Calvino has taken complex scientific principles and turned them into stories. Its true that there is a certain lack of character development, as the main character is a one-dimensional atomic particle (pun intended), but even so, Calvino makes him(it?) come alive in his tales. The true feature and attraction of these stories are the situation and worlds that Calvino creates. All that being said, I read this in the same day that I read Cosmicomics, which is a prior collections of similar stories featuring the same character (and, I think, a better book overall), and the artist's conceit wore a little thin. However, if you can give these books sufficient time and space(pun intended again), they are truly fun and beautiful.

Calvino is one of the masters of post-modernism, and his tales fiction highlight one of the most fundamental concerns of the movement: challenging notions of a "reality". t zero reigns as Calvino's finest, most compelling work

Not surprisingly the two early reviews give it 1 and 5 respectively: a book about which it is impossible to be neutral. Confusing,dense, boring writing there is - but also some amazing mathematic/scietific concepts whch Calvino masterly spins into stories - the logic/illogic (which are probably simultaneously both the same and opposite) outcomes baffle and amaze. The final section was more rewarding (being more time-space maths based) - couldn't get a handle on the evolutionary/biological stuff. I also suspect I want to read more about the text and continually get beneath its skin. Will read bits again and again and again. (Not a tour de force of narrative analysis compared to "if on a winter's night..." and castle of crossed destinies)

Italo Calvino's specialty was magical realism -- treeborne nobility, tarot stories, and noblemen chopped in half. But "The Watcher and Other Stories" displays his talents in grittier, more hopeless stories and characters.

The title story involves Amerigo, a rather naive young Communist who is employed as a "Watcher" at a hospital; he keeps an eye on the patients to make sure they are all aware enough to vote. (He spends most of his spare time feuding with his pregnant girlfriend)

As he watches during the voting time, the nuns bring by people who are mentally retarded, deformed, horribly ill, or all three. Some make the best of their dreary lives (like the handless man), and some aren't aware enough to. And what he sees changes Amerigo's way of thinking.

"Smog" is about a pitiful young man who arrives in the city, and immediately becomes pathologically freaked out by all the smog, dust and grime. Even when his elegant celebrity girlfriend spends weekends with him, he can't think about anything except the dust.

And finally, "The Argentine Ant" has a young couple and baby arriving in a country cottage -- only to get invaded by ants that evening. They try desperately to eradicate the pests (which are in every house in the area) but the ants may have an unlikely ally.

Compared to Calvino's warm, slightly surreal stories, "The Watcher and Other Stories" seems like a rather bleak book, without any solid endings to the storylines. The first two are simply dark and a bit depressing, more in the vein of his "Path to the Spiders' Nests," while the third is just tragicomic.

But Calvino's rich, slightly dreamlike writing style is very much intact here, and the more optimistic tone can be found in the socialite, who sees beauty where her boyfriend sees only squalor. And while the descriptions of the sick, deformed and mentally retarded are disturbing, they're also quite sad -- Calvino never forgets that these are all people, who need love, and who were simply unluckier than most.

The main characters vary a lot -- Amerigo is naively Communistic, and rather irresponsible, while the "Smog" guy is rather stagnant (and clearly has OCD as well). But the couple in the last story are rather nice, especially since everybody has had this sort of harrowing situation.

"The Watcher And Other Stories" is a look at Calvino's darker, more meditative stories. This is realism, not magical realism.

The Watcher and Other Stories is a collection of three different but thematically interlinked stories. I personally thought that the title story was the most intriguing. The Watcher deals with our protagonist "watching" the voting procedures in a home for invalids/deranged/etc. The home is a mini city and becomes a type of microcosm of Italian society. Smog deals again with the futility of human life through pollution. The Argentine Ants is a type of mock horror story. All of the above are extremely well written and executed. Although I did enjoy this book, I would suggest that readers unfamiliar with Calvino try some of his masterpieces first, and then move onto the minutiae of works such as these.

The three long stories that comprise this book at first appear to have been slapped together without much concern for whether they work well with one another. Not only were they written at different points in Calvino's career -- "The Watcher" is from 1963, "Smog" from 1958 and "The Argentine Ant" from 1952, but they don't even get the continuity that a single translator might have been able to provide. That's why it's so surprising that a common theme in these works emerges anyway -- namely, that existence is futile and farcical and yet also must be cherished because, in the end, what else is there?

The protagonists of these stories are all seeking ways to somehow make the futility bearable or even meaningful. "The Watcher" portrays Amerigo Ormea, an election observer assigned to a polling place that is actually a mental institution. Amerigo's long-held political convictions are, if not wavering, then at least punch-drunk from having been slapped around so much. The momentous changes once foreseen by him have not materialized, and as a result he is trying to believe that change is a gradual and even mundane process, a matter of "doing as much as you could, day by day." Calvino uses the asylum and its inhabitants a metaphor for democratic society and its odd creatures. In doing so he displays a keen talent for showing up grand arguments like whether democracy is viable for the absurd squabbles they may be at their core -- like whether a ballot sheet has been properly folded, or whether an armless man's vote counts if someone has to go into the voting booth with him. Amerigo struggles to accept that such grotesque banality is the very stuff of democracy. This struggle is sometimes involving and insightful and sometimes not. The force of the story is somewhat blunted by too many philosophical musings on Calvino's part. He may mean to send up the diehard's tendency toward philosophical musings, but they are droning and often repetitive and not particularly exciting to read. Nevertheless, "The Watcher" has a lot to offer. In the other two stories, the main characters also must persevere in the face of circumstances they cannot control. "Smog" demonstrates an acute awareness of environmental peril that seems somewhat ahead of its time. But as in "The Watcher," Calvino's chief concern is how humanity copes. The main character has just moved to the city and is overwhelmed by its filth. He washes his hands compulsively as he observes how the urbanites deal with a dirty fog that is intensifying its grip on the city. One man simply makes the filth a part of himself, living and breathing it with hardly a thought. Another, a factory owner and the worst polluter in the city, tries to redeem himself by funding "The Institute for the Purification of the Urban Atmosphere in Industrial Centers." A worker in one of his factories "didn't try to evade all the smoky gray around us, but to transform it into a moral value, an inner criterion."

Smog is substituted by ants in "The Argentine Ant." A young couple moves into a new home only to find that it -- and the homes of all their neighbors -- infested with millions of the unstoppable insects. The young husband goes neighbor to neighbor in search of a solution. One has a garageful of insecticides and chemicals, and a chuckling anecdote explaining the failure of each one. Another man rigs elaborate deathtraps out of string and gasoline. The woman who rents the houses out simply denies that the ants are a problem even as they bite her on the buttocks and crawl up her back. The town regularly sends out an exterminator, but the residents are convinced he is actually feeding the ants as a way of keeping his job. In both "Smog" and "The Argentine Ant," no one thinks to simply leave. There seems to be a tacit agreement among them that moving would only exchange one problem for another. Calvino's characters are inescapably grounded where they find themselves, learning to live with that which they find unbearable.

This book provides ample evidence of Calvino's skill and vision. It is definitely a worthwhile read.

The Watcher and Other Stories is a collection of three of Calvino's stories put together in a single volume for no obvious reason other than they are by the same author. As a fan of Calvino's work, I have to admit that this is the closest I've come to describing one of his books as "tedious." However, in each story Calvino still wields his pen with an imagination that few can even come close to matching. Each narrative effectively brings the reader to a different world filled with well-rounded characters and unique circumstances--most notably an ant-infested neighborhood.

While not the most engrossing of Calvino's works, The Watcher and Other Stories is still worth picking up for fans of the breathtakingly creative author.

If you see polka dots as round stripes (as I do) then this collection will appeal to you. This guy has a really off beat take on the world.

When I read "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler" I was completely pulled in and engrossed by the creative, crafted nature of the story and of Calvino's abilities. So, years later, I picked up this book of short stories. Since "Winters Night" is really a collection of related short stories, I expected ,uch the same. UNfortunately, I didn't like it as much. This book represents a real cross-section of his work. I found that most of his political allegories were a little too heavy for me. What I found most interesting were the stories that focused on relationships. Mother to son, lover to lover, friend to friend. This is where I was most interested. Since I seem to prefer Calvino in certain types of fiction, this may not have been the best collection for me. If you are a fan of Calvino & are looking for a good overview, this book may be better for you.

this engaging collection of stories shows calvino's versatility.playfully absurd fables, mind-bending exercises in combinatorics, "interviews" with somewhat deranged historical figures, glaciation interrupting a romantic encounter, an encylopedia of all human knowledge... these ideas and more are all expressed with humor, economy and wonderful style.

I was instead disappointed. I enjoyed Italo's Italian Folktakes so much that I thought this would be another endless read. Instead, I found it dry and methodical. While some of the stories were intriguing, the majority were immature works created by talented authors. Meaning, many of the stories just didn't have the direction, plot, or moral I expect from a "fantastic tale."

The stories collected in this volume span through some several hundred years and many languages. The authors represented wrote not only in the genre of the fantastic, they are recognized masters. But here we find their finest, eeriest, most bizarre and phantasmagoric tales. Reading through the book provides a real sense of the development of the ghost story and the fantasy through the years.

Perhaps of even greater importance, for those of us who are Calvino fans, we can see what stories the Italian fabulist cherished most, what he read and what influenced him. He places each book in a historical and literary context, and the opening essay is truly key to understanding Calvino's theories of the fantastic, which in themselves make this book worth buying!

Italo Calvino is an artist in many different meanings of that word. But his first book, _The Path to the Nest of Spiders_, brings another view to the author. Told from the perspective of the child, Calvino is able to use his fantastic style, as well as his earthy analysis of the situations that arise. The Characters are both real and symbols, from the Sister who shares her bed each night, to the cook that is both an anarchist and a father to the boy. Calvino is truly a master at his craft, and this book shows where he came from, and how he is able to see the world and write about it

All of us have wondered what postmodernism is but haven't dared to ask. By tracing the career of this noteworthy author we learn about him, his works, and the hows and whys of the present postmodern movement we live in.

This is an excellent addition to the already large body of work about the author.

Like other Calvino offerings, 'The Castle of Crossed Destinies' is a formal and structural flourish. Travelers arrive at a castle, and, in the second part of the book, a tavern, robbed of the ability to speak; instead, they convey their adventures using tarot cards. As each character tells their story, the deck forms a pattern in which each tale, and its intersection with others, can be read. This is Calvino's (*subtle*) metaphor for narrative, i.e. as paradigm and syntagm. The travelers' recollections, however, are less engaging than the vignettes in 'Invisible Cities' or 'If on a winter's night a traveler'.

... but I'm such an avid Tarot fan that I still recommend this to others who want to see his treatment of the subject.
Naturally, the Tarot is interpretated differently by almost everyone who indulges. But, hey!... that's the point of studying it as far as I'm concerned.

Definitely check this one out!

Calvino is one of the most creative writers I've ever had the pleasure of reading. The concept alone of this book is jaw-dropping in its possibilities--a group of strangers come together and tell their adventures through tarot cards. Each tarot combination is illustrated and interpreted by the narrator with ties to several mythological tales. It is all extremely subjective and extremely ambitious.

All of that aside, the concept proved to be more than Calvino could adeptly handle. (He admitted to never being completely satisfied with the book and finally published it as a way to put it to rest) However, I don't think I've ever read another author who could have handled the subject matter better than Calvino. All in all, I would only recommend this to Calvino's most devoted admirers.

Just as the tarot card reading unfolds in the story, this book has innumerable levels that beg for thought and interpretation: it is part historical novel, part fortune-telling, and part a history of the great classics of western civilization. It is also a fascinating experiment in expanding the literary vehicle, adding the dimension of the cards - functioning as kind of symbolic building blocks as well as a springboard for association - that creates a parallel narrative to the gorgeous descriptive power of the work. Calvino, I feel, has created a work as complex and rich as the best of Nabokov. As with all truly great novels, there is a great deal left unsaid, that the reader can mull over if she so chooses. While the vocabulary was very difficult for my primitive Italian, it was as beautifully written as Calvino's other work.

Warmly recommended.

Italo Calvino was a master of surreal storytelling -- he was, for example, one of only two authors I've seen who could manage a second-person narrative. But his gimmick falls flat in "The Castle of Crossed Destinies," a book that is intriguingly laid out, but never manages to be more than a curiosity.

In the first section, a traveler comes to a castle full of other guests, but for some reason no one there is able to speak. To tell each other about their histories, they use a pack of tarot cards to communicate their stories -- tales about love affairs, ancient cities, and Faustian pacts.

The second is pretty much the same, except that it takes place in a tavern, where mute people are still using tarot cards to describe their pasts. The stories -- evil queens, fallen warriors, even an Arthurian tale -- get darker and stranger, especially when the narrator himself began to describe his own past to the people who are watching him and the cards.

As an idea, tarot cards being used to tell a story is brilliant. Especially since the stories that Calvino spins out are not necessarily the only interpretation -- each card used to tell the story can be interpreted differently. The problem is, in the first half of the book, Calvino tries to apply this to some very boring, straightforward little stories. They tend to stop suddenly, without much of a finale.

The second half of the book uses this gimmick more skilfully, with Calvino writing in greater detail, and using more ornate, atmospheric writing. It feels less like stories wrapped around some cards, and more like stories with cards as illustrations of what might have been. He also adds a more eerie, macabre tale to this half, making it even more engaging.

The first half sags in a big way; it's almost tiring to read. But the second half of "Castle of Crossed Destinies" is where Calvino's tarot gimmick starts to pay off. Interesting, but not all that it could have been.