Öykülerde kısa durum anları, geniş ve müthiş bir dille anlatılmış.
Calvino'yu uzun aralar verip tekrar okumak gerçekten çok lezzetli.

Tredici racconti brevi rappresentano “gli amori difficili”, contrastati, magari giusto abbozzati, o solo sognati; due racconti più lunghi ampliano la prospettiva: riguardano “la vita difficile”, nella sua totalità. Sono quadri fatti di pennellate sapienti, dosate: una scrittura notevole in sé, con la tristezza degli argomenti stemperata sempre da belle dosi di ironia.

Un Italo Calvino forse un po' meno a suo agio in questi racconti d'impronta così tradizionale e realista, ma bisogna ammettere che il tema è difficilissimo: gli amori accennati, quelli che potevano essere e non furono; un'intera vita insieme sfiorata, ma mai avvenuta; le occasioni perdute, quelle dimenticate o trascurate, e quelle lasciate ad aspettare per sempre. Notevolissimi i due racconti della seconda parte, intitolata "La vita difficile": "La formica argentina" e "La nuvola di smog", certamente più ispirati di quelli che danno il titolo alla raccolta, e più rappresentativi dell'immenso talento di Calvino, che resta uno dei miei preferiti di sempre.

This was my seventh Calvino, and how ever many other books of his I get to read in the future, I simply can't see anything topping the masterpiece that was 'Invisible Cities'. This collection of short stories does see Calvino in wonderful form though, but as we are dealing with 28 pieces in all, some were obviously better than others. It felt a bit like an album with a few tracks too many. But this is Calvino. Even a sub-par Calvino isn't worth pressing the skip button for. Calvino was one of the master tricksters of 20th century literature, an author who builds an imaginary stage of words around the reader, until the reader almost becomes the protagonist themselves. 'Difficult Loves' is split into four sections - 'Riviera Stories' is a series of nostalgic vignettes of childhood and adolescence set to backdrop of rural Italy and the magical richness of the Mediterranean. Enchanted Gardens, playing with toads, that sort of thing.

'Wartime Stories' sees Calvino focus on WW2. These were fatalistic evocations of the unglamorous and deadly aspects of life during wartime: foraging for food, crossing a minefield, running messages for the Resistance. One story tells of the worst shot in the village hunting down a German soldier in the forests, which felt like a mini neo-folktale, leading to Calvino to compile the Italian Folktales. 'Postwar Stories' features a black-market money changer whose wife is mistaken for a prostitute, whilst another briefly looks at the break in of a bakery which sees the perpetrators stuff there faces with various pastries.

Arguably, some of the best were saved until last, 'Stories of Love and Loneliness' written in the fifties, sees Calvino slowly began to break from realism for the richer depths of philosophy, myth and fantasy. These stores are all similarly titled 'Adventure of a... Including - Soldier, Bather, Photographer, and traveller. All explore similar ideas, with brief moments of universal comprehension and ignorance arising from everyday life. We see a man on train who meets a woman, yes just like in the movies, and another tells of the embarrassing moment when a female bather somehow manages to lose her swimsuit in the sea. Whoops!

Calvino is as interested in how we mean something as in what we mean. In his world, a ship can show the truth like a book, and a pair of glasses can block recognition better than a wall. From an adolescent child courting with gifts from natures treasure chest, to a modest clerk fresh from a one night stand, the characters of Difficult Loves scurry about their lives searching for human communication. More than 75% of the stories I felt were in the 4/5 bracket, along with two or three duds, so a four is about right.

Avevo delle aspettative altissime per questa raccolta di racconti (che ho acquistato ben 6 anni fa, e che ho avuto il "coraggio" di leggere solo quest'anno), e forse sono state proprio tali aspettative a rovinarmi il viaggio tra le storie di Calvino.
Spesso mi sono ritrovata quasi ad annoiarmi, e non trovare un filo logico tra le poche pagine che accomunavano gli stessi personaggi. Ho avuto degli spunti riflessivi di rado, e a volte mi è sembrato come se dovessi proseguire per forza, solo per terminare il libro.
Non mi aspettavo un'esperienza del genere, ma credo che si tratti di un'eccezione, di un caso isolato.
Mi sono confrontata con altre persone che invece questa raccolta l'hanno amata con tutto il cuore, quindi non mi sento di non darle un'altra chance, per il futuro magari.
Per ora credo proprio che la rimetterò in libreria al suo posto, dove mi ha aspettata per gli ultimi sei anni...

Benim sadık yarim Italo Calvino'dur.

Muszę jednak przyznać, że lektura Calvino to wspaniała przygoda <3

Twelve "adventures" stripped down to spectacular adventures, ranging from that of a soldier to that of a skier, passing through a few other entries: a bandit, a bather, a reader, a myope ... So many anonymous figures around which Calvino embroiders, most often on the grounds of no communication, of the small failure, to stage this impassable part, tiny or gaping, which separates us from each other. But above all, we let ourselves be carried away by a sure style, chiseled and yet removed, which makes most of these tough love real nuggets.

La mia videorecensione: https://youtu.be/0yjn16noikA

Calvino to the power of four : this volume includes not one, but four of the writer's short story collections, covering distinct periods of both the country and the author's development. We begin with childhood and innocence, youngsters basking in a golden glow of prewar idyllic rural / seaside existence ( Riviera Stories ) ; we are expelled from the Garden of Eden by the cruelties and savagery of the second world war ( Wartime Stories ) ; we suffer from hunger, cold, poverty with the rest of the Italian people in the aftermath of the conflict ( Postwar Stories ); finally we emerge back into the sunlight, and have time for leisure and love, but by now middle age comes with disillusionment and alienation ( Stories of Love and Loneliness)

I didn't check the publication dates, but the historical and personal developments that link and give continuity the individual episodes turn the collection into a sort of picarescque novel following a hero on a quest through life, changing maybe his name or his appearance, but remaining true to his inner nature, a personification of a whole nation through the masks worn by the different actors in the Commedia del Arte performed by Calvino for our entertainment. The structure, both a discrete puzzle and a unitary big picture - reminds me of other works by Calvino, especially the first book of his that I read : "Marcovaldo", by its focus on local colour over the more metaphysical content of later novels and stories.

The journey begins aptly with a young boy named Libereso, a simple gardener apprentice, who entices a kitchen maid called Maria-Nunziata into the secrets of his garden, gifting her with all the hidden wonders of the world. The reader experiences right from the start the beauty and the subversive nature of Calvino's art - the laughter, the wildness, the deft translation from the factual to the metaphorical narration. ( "Adam, One Afternoon" )

A golden glow of whimsical remembrance infuses the next stories in the first season, continuing the analogy with the biblical paradise ( The Enchanted Garden), moving then from green paths to the wonders of the blue world of the sea (Big Fish, Little Fish), and further capturing the moment when a boy meets a girl, or a woman. Adam continues his attempts at seduction with a small garden snake, with a multi-coloured fish, with a hunted rabbit or with a beehive, yet Calvino slowly, patiently introduces his social commentary into the narrative. The garden is surrounded by walls, protecting the property of the rich; a simple shepherd is made fun of during a family dinner by his employer; an older man hides in an abandoned garden from his past misdeeds, protected by wild bees; a hardworking family man is bitterly complaining about his sons who just want to sleep all day and gamble all night:

... everything was so beautiful: sharp bends in the path and high, curling eucalyptus leaves and patches of sky. But there was always the worrying thought that it was not their garden, and that they might be chased away at any moment.

The dark overtones of the later stories ease the transition into the war years, with characters now putting love for women on a second plane, as they play hide and seek in the mountains with brown shirts and nazis. Death has dominion over the garden, and fear, betrayal, hunger, revenge have all escaped from Pandorra's box. I found some of the wartime short stories slightly atypical of Calvino, a little too complimentary towards the style of Hemingway, but I guess the nature of the subject determines the tonality and the seriousness of the prose. Nevertheless, Calvino is a true Italian, and never forgets, even in the deepest despair, to laugh and to dance and to sing his troubles away. Animal Woods is my favorite episode here, and it showcases the inventivity, the bombastic, anarchist, often illegal response to authority figures of the Italian peasantry. The author here already experiments with the mythical, fairytale, ironical prose style that will characterize his later novels and stories.

The best is yet to come in the present volume, but in order to get there, the reader needs to pass through the dire years of post-war shortages and social unrest. The social commentary is in plain view now, Calvino using laughter and a baroque exuberance to underline the contrast between dreams and reality.
Theft in the Pastry Shop has both the thieves and the law enforcers succumb to the temptation of sugar in an irrepressible feeding frenzy. Dollars and the Demimondaine moves the orgy of the senses to a small tavern by the seaside where local black market money dealers try to liberate the hard currency from the fingers of onshore American sailors with the help of prostitudes, liberated women and even wives. Sleeping Like Dogs is a tragedy wrapped in the sense of humour of Laurel and Hardy, trying to fit a dozen people or more into a tight corner of a small railway station. Once again, the Italian spirit refuses to bow down and accept defeat, and one street smart grifter discovers how to make a profit even from the hands of the homeless. I also have a favorite here : Desire in November , describing the charity efforts made to clothe the poor for the coming winter. A local priest is distributing wool underwear:

Sometimes the line wound down past the corners of the stairs: widows in reduced circumstances who seldom left their attics, beggars with hacking coughs, dusty countrymen stamping about in hobnailed boots, disheveled youths - emmigrants from somewhere or other - who wore sandals in winter and raincoats in summer. Sometimes this slow and squalid stream spread right on down past the mezzanine floor and the glass doors of the Fabrizia's, the furriers. And the elegant women going to have their minks or astrakhan altered had to hug the bannisters to avoid brushing against the ragged crew.

Into this crowd comes Barbagallo, ready to scandalize the poor, the clergy, the clerks and the rich patrons indiscriminately with his nakedness and his rough jokes, bitterly complaining about his fate, yet more alive than everybody else in the city. He is obscene, irreverent of all authority, larger than life and he reminds me a lot of another colourful character named Italo Bombolini, the unlikely mayor of Santa Vittoria (played by Anthony Quinn in the movie version of the Robert Chrichton story):

... under the fringe of white hair falling over his forehead he had two big, merry blue eyes, and a broad, vinous, happy face

Eventually, the lean years pass, and the author turns his attention to the pursuit of love in the last part of the collection. The social commentary never fades completely into the background, but the mood is definitely more jocular and all the girls have an ironic, secretive glint in their eyes as they watch the mating dances of the male of the species. I guess these stories were written at a later period than the first three collections, because they show Calvino in top form, mixing real urban poetry with his signature exuberance of imagination and his barbed satire of the more foolish habits of his compatriots.

It so happened that Enrico Gnei, a clerk, spent a night with a beautiful lady. Coming out of her house, early, he felt the air and the colors of the spring morning open before him, cool and bracing and new, and it was as if he were walking to the sound of music.

And why should not clerks fall in love like anybody else, like a soldier trying to make the best of a tight train bench, or a salesman travelling all night to meet with his girlfriend in the weekend, or a nearsighted man whose eyes are open to the beauties walking up and down the street in the evening. The link between all these stories is the ultimate loneliness of each man, even in their most passionate impulses. Yes, the women are out there, and often they send clear signals of availability and interest, but most of the men treat love as a game to be played on a virtual screen inside their heads, loving their anticipation and their fantasies more than the flesh and blood sitting right next to them. The extreme case of this dissociation is in the episode of the Reader, not surprisingly from the author of "If On a Winter night A Traveller ...". Calvino blurs the dividing line between the words written on paper and the reality of sight and touch and smell, with hilarious results that nevertheless touch on fundamental issues of the way we relate to the world:

For some time Amedeo had tended to reduce his participation in active life to the minimum. Not that he didn't like action: on the contrary, love of action nourished his whole character, all his tastes; and yet, from one year to the next, the yearning to be someone who did things declined, declined, until he wondered if he had ever really harbored that yearning. His interest in action survived, however, in his pleasure in reading; his passion was always the narration of events, the stories, the tangle of human situations.

I have a favorite in the last collection too, and of course it is the story of the photographer, one that strikes extremely close to home in view of my own interest and history with a camera. The short story is almost an essay on the function of memory and of the nature of love as a figment of the imagination. I well remember my beginnings in the art with a basic full manual Russian camera and the smells of chemicals in the bathroom as I patiently waited for an image to be revealed on the blank piece of paper:

When spring comes, the city's inhabitants, by the hundreds of thousands, go out on Sundays with leather cases over their shoulders. And they photograph one another. They come back happy as hunters with bulging game bags; they spend days waiting, with sweet anxiety, to see the developed pictures (anxiety to which some add the subtle pleasure of alchemistic manipulations in the darkroom, forbidding any intrusion by members of the family, relishing the acid smell that is harsh to the nostrils). It is only when they have the photos before their eyes that they seem to take tangible posession of the day they spent, only then that the mountain stream, the movement of a child with his pail, the glint of the sun on the wife's legs take on an irrevocability of what has been and can no longer be doubted. Everything else can drown in the unreliable shadow of memory.

Antonino is a bachelor surrounded by married friends with children, grumpily accepting to be the button pusher for family portraits, while considering himself above such trivial pursuits: One of the first instinct of parents, after they have brought a child into the world, is to photograph it. complains Antonino. Pretty soon though he gets the photographing virus himself, buys an old fashioned glass plate wooden box and styles himself an artist: A few accidental successes had sufficed to give him nonchalance and assurance with view-finder and light meters. , an artist who still casts a critical eye at his friends banal subjects:

The minute you start saying something, 'Ah, how beautiful! We must photograph it!' you are already close to the view of the person who thinks that everything that is not photographed is lost, as if it never existed, and that therefore, in order to really live, you must photograph as much as you can, and to photograph as much as you can you must either live in the most photographable way possible, or else consider photographable every moment of your life. The first course leads to stupidity; the second to madness.

The rant is particularly appropiate to the modern age where taking photos has become a trivial pursuit : selfies, food in restaurants, pets and overblown HDR landscapes are filling the internet servers with instant updates that in their accumulation almost confirm the prediction of Calvino that we are trying to prove that every second of our life is significant and worthy of immortality. Antonino still lives in an age when he has time to pause and reflect before pressing that remote control button:

Did he want to photograph dreams? This suspicion struck him dumb, hidden in that ostrich refuge of his with the bulb in his hand, like an idiot.

The short stories in "Difficult Loves" are like photographs of particular moments in the lives of the people of Italy before and after the war, but they are snapshots taken by a true artist, a man with the eye and the sensibility to recognize the universal beauty and sadness of the ordinary pursuits of ordinary people. Under his pen they become extraordinary and eternal. I am so glad I have still a few of his books waiting to be read and cherished.

Generalmente odio i racconti, mi pesa non potermi immergere in un romanzo e non poter vivere le emozioni dei personaggi; ma questo libro è stato diverso.
Alcuni racconti non mi hanno particolarmente toccato, ma altri, come “L’avventura di due sposi”, mi hanno lasciato una dolcezza infinita; un senso di incompletezza che, in quanto tale, lascia aperta la porta a qualsiasi possibilità.

Riletto almeno 10 anni dopo la prima volta, mi convinco sempre più che certi autori si possono apprezzare nelle loro sfaccettature solo dopo aver acquisito una certa esperienza di vita (e di lettura). Calvino è così: solo adesso ho colto certe sue riflessioni a proposito della bellezza, dell'amore e della ricerca del proprio scopo. Proverò a rileggerlo tra altri 10 anni, per capire se qualcos'altro mi è sfuggito.