I just read the "argentine ant" (I was searching for this story and find it in this book which consist of two other short stories. After I finished the "argentine ant" I started to read the other stories, but I did not like them that much. That made the whole rating of three star. If I want to rate just the "argentine ant" story, I will give it four star! :)

The Watcher: too dull to finish = 0 stars
Smog: intriguing idea with not a great deal of substance and a lackluster finish = 1.5 stars
The Argentine Ant: probably the best story, but also not a great ending = 2 stars
Not up to par with other Calvino works I have read

This took me several times starting over the last few years to get into. Ultimately, my perseverance was rewarded, but I still would not recommend this to someone who doesn't already know and appreciate Calvino's better known works.

A strong three stars; I really liked these scenarios and stories and the perspective Calvino brings, they just fall into the same bleak / miserable / misanthropic zone that makes it tough for me to get into Beckett and Nabakov and such.

I found this collection very enjoyable. It was discussed on the London Review of Books Past, Present, Future podcast, and I love that show so much I had to read this before I listened to the episode. As a consequence, it's months since the episode was released, but now I can finally listen to it. In fact, that podcast is just about the first story, "The Watcher", as the politics of the story and what it says about democracy are discussed by David Runciman and Ian McEwan.

It's not out of the question this collection of stories could be categorised as horror. That's not really a genre I read, and this would be the mildest possible form, but there's an unsettling, disquieting element to each of the stories. There's absolutely nothing supernatural going on, but a slight sense of a grotesque threat.

I could see myself rereading this because there was so much to unpack in "The Watcher" that just one reading doesn't seem to do it justice. It's only 75 pages long, so by the time I'd got used to Calvino's style and his perspective, the story was half over. I sort of wish I'd read one of the other stories first to get into his way of writing so that I was fully prepared to engage with "The Watcher" from page 1.

The second story, "Smog" - also unsettling and unsettled - contains this gem,

There are those who condemn themselves to the most gray, mediocre life because they have suffered some grief, some misfortune; but there are also those who do the same thing because their good fortune is greater than they feel they can sustain.

Three (long) short stories or novellas from a master. In each of these, Calvino’s style shines through. The style is not so much fantasy or magical realism as it is one of detailed realism, almost scientifically examined until it becomes absurd.

In the title story, The Watcher, a communist party member volunteers to serve as a poll watcher. (From 1943 to 1993 Italy had compulsory voting, although there were no penalties enforced for not voting.) But such a system creates a whole new array of issues. The main character is assigned to a voting precinct in a giant Church-run urban institution that is a combination of convent, school, sanitarium and psychiatric asylum. As the author catalogs the great variety of voters and all their mental and physical needs (paraplegics; blind, deaf, immobile, insane, unresponsive), the story becomes a parody of what is the act of voting about. Even “normal” people run the gamut from anger, suspicions and complaints about spots on their ballot, to those who are gleeful about the process. Calvino makes parallels of the voting act with a religious rite and leaves us with the feeling of “….the certainty of what they were doing, but also a hint of absurdity” and why these elections “…were mistaken for an expression of the will of the people.”

In Smog a young man moves to a large, dirty Italian city to become editor of “Purification,” a journal about air pollution. Of course he becomes obsessive about his dirty apartment, washes his hands constantly, and worries about visits from his upper-class girlfriend.

In Ants, a young couple rents a house in an area overrun with ants. Again, we have the scientific cataloging of how the ants invade the home, insecticides, the learning from neighbors about ways to kill and trap the ants.

Great absurdist stories!

“smog” might be an all-timer for me tbqh

I remember nothing of this book I had to read for a book club.

I had a difficult time maintaining interest in the title story (all those paranthetical clauses were pretty tedious), but both "Smog" and "The Argentine Ant" were quite good.

The watcher - perfect barely coherent ramblings of a conflicted socialist