I love Italo Calvino. His writing makes my heart cry. Even when nothing is really happening in the plot, I just love the language, his characters, his turns of phrase. The alien landscapes (it's just mid-century Italy, but to me, it feels like a whole world away, a post-war / Renaissance place all at once). There are maybe three, four stories in this book. I loved them. A story about a terrible smog, a story about terrible ants--they felt like sister-stories, for sure. A kind of echoing effect. I am glad I bought this in paperback form instead of borrowing it digitally from the library, it belongs to me, on my bookshelf forever, until I find someone I think needs to read it, too

Even the stories not about ants make you feel like there is a stream of tiny ants crawling all inside you. Abject, unsettling, with one or two references to Baudrillard to top it off. I liked it a lot, also I hated it.


More concretely, I think I like it because I appreciate how each story can be read in really different ways and as a result forced me to really think about why I was reacting the way I was to each story. I had a conversation with Evan yesterday where he told me why the ending of the Watcher was an optimistic take on (democratic) politics, which I agreed with. But after reading the other two stories, I couldn't help but feel that each story's ending (which can all be seen as optimistic) came across more as sardonically optimistic, that is, pessimistic, or at least making fun of naive optimism. Each ending has a kind of idyllic, isolated peace & romance to it, which is a reprieve from the depression that each main character suffers through, and it's a peace that I want to latch onto precisely because the rest of the story is so depressing. At the end of the day though, none of the depressive/oppressive problems that the characters face are resolved, or are even close to being resolved. In the Smog, the Commendatore is still polluting the air for profit while hiding behind his magazine, and the union members are too timid to create real change. The same is true in the Ants, and, I think in the Watcher. It feels at best naive and at worst disingenuous to view the purely individual and emotional scenes of "hope" at the end of each story as the moral when there is no semblance of organized, structural progress made to address the actual problems.

I bought this book on the recommendation of Ian McEwan, who discussed 'The Watcher' on the LRB 'Past, Present, Future' podcast. He spoke about how this titular short story was the perfect depiction of representative democracy and told us all we need to know about how it functions. This would not have been my takeaway from this collection. Instead, I was taken by Calvino's consistency, each short story was as good as the last and each seeming to intertwine so perfectly, despite their diverse subject matter. The disquiet felt by the watcher in witnessing the abject lives of the Cottolengo, the dread that the journalist feels in 'The Smog', the tickling anxiety that the family feel in 'The Argentine Ant', all seemed to complement each other so perfectly. A wonderful collection.

Maybe you have to be Italian to appreciate these stories.

Or maybe something was lost in the translations.

I got it for "The Argentine Ant" story which has the reputation of being a notable work of fiction on ants.

Tedious.

This was recommended by Past Present Future podcast by the LRB. I enjoyed the conversational sections more, though some of it is pretty unintelligible and consists mainly of complicated observations relating to political theory. Perhaps the translation has clouded some of the key points, however, the setting and descriptions of the residents of Cottolengo are really engaging and evocative.

Calvino, yay!

Two great stories but "The Watcher" is more than a little blah.

Acquired 1996
The Word, Montreal, Quebec

I have read some of Italo Calvino's book and the thing I loved about him is his way to describe even how characters breathe. I hope this book won't be the exception.I am so glad I have the chance the "best story telling/ writer" of Italy.

Three long stories. The one about a neighborhood invaded by ants is amazing. The other two are kind of sleepy pieces that didn't do much for me. BUt in all three, Calvino created amazing last paragraphs. Stunning endings for all his work, even the lesser ones.

The title story, about a member of Italian Communist Party assigned to observe voting at a hospital for "incurables," is a breath-taking story! It's much darker in tone than typical Calvino story -- at least ones in Difficult Loves and Marcovaldo -- but retains the quintessential Calvino compassion and humanity. Scene with elderly peasant father sharing almonds with his brain-damaged son is a microcosm of the story's quietly moving tone.

(I'm jumping around in my reading some these days, so it might be a while before I get back to the other 2 stories in this collection for a final review. Nonetheless, the title story alone makes it worth reading.)

I find that the Calvino stories are less convincing, at times, than the set pieces. Maybe I just need to read the folk tales, but the various "musings of men" type of pieces are less lyrical than the scenes and more plot-driven stories.