I gave this high marks based on "The Watcher" alone since this is the only distant past read book and will review. "The Watcher" helped form my little tag line on outreach that once you are aware of somes situations, one is compelled to do what one can to help. What else can one do when faced with many of the tragedies of life?

I liked a lot! The Watcher and The Argentine Ant were funny. Classic Calvino.

Three pearls.

Almost every Calvino work has at least one great story or segment. The titular story of Under the Jaguar Sun is excellent, the beginning chapters of Mr. Palomar are great, The Road to San Giovanni has a great essay on garbage, even the subpar collection Numbers in the Dark features a story I consider excellent ("Wind in a City"). This is to say nothing of Calvino's works that are brilliant throughout, foremost among them Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. Sadly, The Watcher and Other Stories does not feature a standout moment. Instead we receive three longer-than-normal short stories, all of which are thematically similar, though none of the three explore the shared theme in interesting ways.

The Watcher is the weakest of the three stories in my opinion, featuring a rambling and disjointed narrative that never gains any momentum. The premise of a communist monitoring a polling station in a huge hospital complex, full of both the physically and mentally impaired, has more promise than Calvino manages to manifest. There are some strong segments where the main character muses on democracy while watching the inhabitants of the hospital, shunned by most of society, cast their votes. Such imagery is watered down with a tangential relationship story that never resolves, political history inserted in an inorganic manner, and an ending that attempts to establish a final feeling of tranquility, but fails.

The second story, Smog, has a more focused narrative, but by its end it was just as underwhelming as The Watcher. A man moves to a city to start a new job and finds that it's impossible to keep anything clean. He struggles with this feeling of uncleanliness, which is the focus of his work as well. His girlfriend manages to remain unbesmirched, but the main character takes little comfort in this. In the end though he finds a little oasis of cleanliness out in the countryside. The main problem that I had with this story is that it's not at all clear what the constant dirtiness is supposed to represent: is it politics, or loss of idealism, or class issues, or stress, or actual pollution, or what? The story contains references to all of these things, so it's all but impossible to parse, a fact not made any easier when Calvino introduces the specter of nuclear war as well. The best guess I have for what the smog is supposed to represent is the blanket topic of "modern concerns," the problem being that, not only is that topic so broad as to be rendered nebulous, but Calvino fails to say anything new or interesting about it.

The Argentine Ant is possibly the strongest work in this collection, but remains unimpressive. When a man, his wife, and their infant son move to Argentina they find that their house- and indeed, all the surrounding houses- are infested with ants. The different neighbors have all adopted different approaches to dealing with the pests, from the neighbors that try to block off the invaders, to the neighbor that creates elaborate machines to destroy them, to the neighbor that just attempts to ignore them. Here, just as with the symbolism in Smog, the symbolism of the ants seems to be generic instead of specific: daily worries is what I think they're intended to represent. The ants are what get into the kitchen and ruin your food, they're what makes your baby cry, they're what keep you from sleeping soundly at night. The neighbors show us some of the strategies people adapt to defeat their daily worries, but the truth is you'll never be able to do away with such worries entirely. There are places of temporary respite, like the beach, but the problems will be waiting for you when you come back. These are pretty uninteresting thoughts about your everyday troubles. The ending also rang false, mimicking the ending of Smog note for note despite it being a strange way to end the story in terms of tone.

Nothing great here, unfortunately. Check out Calvino's other collections and give this one a pass unless you're a devoted fan.

Worth checking out. I especially liked the story called "Smog", which is about an anti-social guy working for an environmentalist magazine in Italy in the 50s. Interesting parallels to today.

Hey listen, either you like Italo Calvino or you're a senseless philistine with no sense of beauty and what is important in our lives. No biggie.

But in all seriousness, Calvino is one of the Great Writers of history with a capital 'W'. And because of his reputation and the amount of praise heaped upon him, some people don't get it. These people are probably lacking in a fundamental way a part of them that truly makes them human, but hey, whatever!

Personally, as a non-sub-human offense to creation, I love the shit out of Calvino and got everything I wanted out of this story. You get a political aperitif of absurdity in the Watcher, a main dish of internal strife in the magnificent story of alienation in Smog and it all comes to a nice close with the short, sweet Argentine Ants bringing just the tiniest hints of class-discussion to a beautiful fable of family struggles.

I'm not saying that by not reading this book you are suffocating a little part of you that would truly make you better inside, but that's exactly what I'm saying.

I've read all the great Calvino, now I'm reading the rest. This is a collection of 3 long short stories, or short novellas.

The first, The Watcher, is about a member of a political party watching the election polls at an area densely populated with a different political party. Lots of philosophizing about politics. And, oh yeah, he finds out his gf is pregnant on the phone at lunch.

The second, Smog, is about a guy who lives in a polluted city and writes for a magazine entirely devoted to covering air pollution. It turns out the owner of the magazine also owns one of the largest factories in town, so is a big cause of pollution. Also, the guy has a model (or at least rich, famous, and gorgeous) girlfriend that drops in on him a few times. Eventually a communist convinces him to come hang out, but not much happens because of it.

The last, The Argentine Ant, is about a young couple with an infant who move into their first house. And it is crawling with Ants. Everywhere, inside and out. The entire town has this problem, and they go through all the different townsfolk's techniques for ridding themselves of the ants, but really those are just coping mechanisms.

Classic Calvino stories..."Smog," published in 1958 was way ahead of its time.

Calvino, first and foremost, exhibits a curiosity towards the strangeness of life's little pleasures as they come-- interspersed-- between man's innate desire to be something remarkable, something important.

Humanity reaches as far as love reaches; it has no frontiers except those we give it.

The three stories play well off each other: stories of something oppressive and inescapable, whether it's an ant infestation, smog, or fascism. There's so much interesting thought and writing in "The Watcher," but it was really hard for me to read the way the narrator thought about the disabled folks around him as sub-human. Just some awful descriptions that make it a story I can't recommend. The other two were wonderfully depressing stories of man and futility. Calvino is a treasure.

Maybe in the 3.5 range.

So there's three stories in here with The Watcher being the longest. All three were interesting and somewhat bizarre. I think there's more going on in them than my often only-partially-awake reading could unearth.

I'm an on and off fan of Calvino. Sometimes it seems he spends too much time in the Philosophy Dept. of the Ivory Tower, which I might have enjoyed more in my early 20's -- Oh, the Salad Days!! -- Still, I must say the middle story, "Smog", about a determined nihilist being manipulated and also manipulating public opinion on smog in the big city is amazing. I sat down to read this 65 or so page story and did not get up until I was finished. Absolutely top-notch. As for the other stories, "The Watcher" was a little too politicky for my taste. If you're Italian and came of age after WWII you might like it; and "The Argentine Ant" I haven't got to...

All in all, a library loaner -- if only for the middle story..