This month’s Calvino Book Club title is an interesting one; it’s a collection of three early stories by Italo Calvino, “Into the War”, first published in 1954 at the start of his writing career, and unusually for the author it draws on his life for his fictions. Although this is one of his early works, it was not translated until 2011, by Martin McLaughlin, and from his introduction it seems that Calvino was not entirely comfortable dipping into what he calls in a note on the book (reproduced here) ‘the literature of memory’. Of course, so many authors use their lives as source material, and Calvino’s early narratives do draw on his time as a partisan (“The Path to the Nest of Spiders”) or the changes taking place in Italy around him (“A Plunge Into Real Estate”). However, “War” goes back further, to the life of a young teenager negotiating adolescence as his country enters the Second World War, and it’s absolutely fascinating.

The book contains three linked short stories: the title one, ‘The Avanguardisti in Menton‘ and ‘UNPA Nights’. Narrated in the first person by a teenage boy (who we inevitably read as Calvino), the stories explore his and his friends reactions to the entry of Italy into WW2, as well as the effects on their small town. Calvino grew up in San Remo (now apparently called Sanremo…) which is on the Italian Riviera, close to the French border; although the location is not explicitly mentioned in the book (IIRC), it is hinted at; and as the second story involves the incursion of Italian forces into a small French town just over the border from San Remo, it’s hard not to take this as a portrait of the area in which Calvino grew up.

However, despite the conflict breaking out, after the first flurry of activity in the title story, life continues in a relatively normal fashion. “Into the War” itself deals with the agitation caused by the evacuation of people from the front line areas. San Remo seems to be a rural area, and local peasants are struggling to cope with being taken away from their land. As a young Avanguardista (a Fascist youth organisation, compulsory for young male school pupils between 14 and 18), the narrator is obliged to help where he can with the evacuees. Housed in a local school, all humanity is on display and the narrator seems torn between compassion and, at times, repulsion. It’s worth remembering how young he is, and he does display a certain detachment from the harsher side of life. Interestingly, too, I saw similarities with the viewpoint of the protagonist in “The Watcher“, particularly in this passage:

But the dominant element in this sea of humanity, the intermittent but recurrent theme which first struck the eye – just as when entering a reception, the eye sees only the breasts and shoulders of the most décolleté women – was the presence in their midst of the lame, the village idiots with goitres, bearded women, female dwarves, people with lips and noses deformed by lupus, the defenceless look of those with delirium tremens. It was this dark face of the mountain villages that was now forced to reveal itself, to be put on parade: the old secret of the country families around whom the village houses huddle like the scales on a pine cone. Now, having been ousted from the darkness, they were trying to find some escape or some stability in the bureaucratic whiteness of that building.

“Menton…” finds things a little calmer. The initial excitement has settled and the Italian troops have pushed on into France, taking Menton. The narrator and his more worldly friend, Biancone, are sent with a detachment of Avanguardisti to the little town to act as a guard of honour for some Spanish Falangists who are passing through. The potential excitement of this soon wears off, and the two boys wander the streets of the sacked town. Their fellows are busy looting, if they can find anything left, and although Biancone joins in, the narrator does not wish to. Instead, he feels pity for the ruined houses and land, and it’s clear his sympathies do not lie with the Fascists or, indeed, conflict.

The final story, “UNPA Nights” (Unione Nazionale per la Protezione Anti-aerea – the Italian Anti-aircraft Corps) sees the two lads having to act as guards for the schoolhouse in case of air raids. After hapless attempts to actually get in, and then to get out, they wander the streets, ostensibly in search of women. However, encounters with prostitutes eventually seem to disgust the narrator and he ends up ruminating on his father, rather than having an exciting night.

This being Calvino, the writing is of course beautiful; even in his more ‘realistic’ writings, his prose is often lyrical, and he captures the strange feeling of adolescence and also the uncertainties of war quite brilliantly. The stories focus on that period of coming of age, exploring the preoccupations of teenage boys with the illicit – girls, drink, cigarettes – and their need to play the fool and act tough. Yet running through them all is the sense that the narrator doesn’t really buy into all of that yet; he seems perhaps a little naive, and his values, which come from his parents, are different from those around him. He has a sympathy for the poor and downtrodden; he displays a sadness when seeing the destruction in Menton; and he has no love for the Fascists or those in authority.

I mentioned his parents, and they’re a constant background presence in the stories; it’s clear that they’re very different from their surroundings, focused on the land and rescuing rare plants in the middle of a massive conflict. As McLaughlin discusses in the introduction, Calvino had a complex relationship with his father, who was a man very much out of time, appearing to belong more to the previous century. Yet the portrait Calvino paints of him at the end of the book, rising early to visit his farm, walking out with his dog, is an affectionate one, and it’s no doubt significant that Calvino’s father had died in 1951; parts of these stories could definitely be read as a tribute to him.

As always with my revisits to Calvino recently, I got so much more out of the book this time round (in fact, I’ve probably only read this once, when it first came out). As well as the lyrical writing, the beautiful capturing of setting and atmosphere, and the exploration of adolescence, I felt that I learned much about Calvino and his relationship to the landscape of his childhood, and also to his parents. In his excellent introduction, McLaughlin hints that the end of this volume leads straight onto another more autobiographical book Calvino wrote, “The Road to San Giovanni”. That came out in 1990, translated into English in 1993, and it’s highly likely I haven’t read it for decades. Perhaps that will be the next book club title, but if not I certainly should pick it up soon. Revisiting Calvino has been one of the highlights of my reading over the last year or so, and this slim but wonderful book was a delight to read.