A complex, perhaps troubling, work by Italo Calvino

This month’s Calvino Book Club title, where we’re prompted by the A Plunge Into Calvino podcast to read a specific work by Italo Calvino, is an interesting one for a number of reasons. Called “The Watcher”, it’s a long short story/novella of 73 pages (of smallish type!), here translated by William Weaver and it was first published in 1963. It’s a book linked to the realism which featured in his early works, although it’s clear at this point that he was moving away from that. The story is not that readily available; it appeared in a volume with two other stories, “Smog” and “The Argentine Ant”, in a US edition but I’m not sure if it’s currently available in this country. However, it’s definitely worth tracking down as there’s much to chew over after reading it…

The watcher of the title is one Amerigo, a young man who’s a member of the Communist Party. Post-War Italy is apparently opening up a little bit, with the chokehold of the Catholic Church being shaken a little. Elections are open to all, and although the old habits die hard, all of the parties are taking them seriously. Watchers from all parties go along to polling centres to supervise the voting and make sure all the correct procedures are followed. This is Amerigo’s role, but the location of the polling is rather unusual.

Cottolengo, also known as Turin’s ‘Hospital for Incurables’, is described as an asylum; having existed on the site for a long time, it houses all manner of human beings who can’t fit into normal everyday society and who are cared for by nuns. As the voting has been widened to include all citizens of Italy, those incarcerated in Cottolengo are also allowed to take part in the polls if they are deemed capable of understanding what’s being asked of them. So Amerigo and his equals from the other parties observe the process and try to make a value judgement as to whether the various participants really know what they’re doing.

And it has to be said that the whole situation has him frankly questioning the meaning of life and what it is to be a human. “Watcher” is a difficult book to read in some ways, as the people living in Cottolengo, who have various disabilities, are described in terms we would not use nowadays. It’s undeniable that people have issues of mental health, or physical restrictions, but our discussion of them nowadays is hopefully more sensitive. Amerigo describes in stark terms what he sees and is led to wonder how far inclusivity should go in our search to involve all in democratic processes. What are the dividing lines which should be drawn when deciding who is capable of understanding and who is not? Is it better to segregate those who can’t cope with everyday society, keeping them in safe surroundings where they might be better off?

“The Watcher” asks hard questions to which there are not obvious answers; and although nowadays we often try to integrate the disadvantaged into mainstream society, it has to be wondered how well people can cope with this. Certainly, in the education sector, I’ve seen children really struggling to deal with mainstream schooling and then flourishing in a specialist setting – it’s very difficult to know what’s best. Amerigo’s mood swings as he contemplates the process around him send him down some difficult routes, and Calvino’s writing style is quite different from usual as he captures those thought processes in long, often complex and lyrical sentences. His temperament is not helped by the complexities of his relationship with his current girlfriend, Lia; their communication is often poor, riddled with misunderstandings and it seems that in the mainstream world it is as hard to find meaning between human beings as it can be in Cottolengo.

It was a hidden Italy that filed through that room, the reverse of the Italy that flaunts itself in the sun, that walks the streets, that demands, produces, consumes; this was the secret of families and of villages, it was also (but not only) rural poverty with its debased blood, its incestuous couplings in the darkness of the stables, the desperate Piedmont which always clings to the efficient, severe Piedmont, it was also (but not only) the end of all races when their plasm sums up all the forgotten evils of unknown predecessors, the pox concealed like a guilty thing, drunkenness the only paradise (but not only that, not that alone), it was the mistake risked by the material of human race each time it reproduces itself, the risk (predictable, for that matter, on a calculable basis, like the outcome of games of chance) which is multiplied by the number of the new snares: the viruses, poisons, uranium radiation… the random element that governs human generation which is called human precisely because it occurs at random….

The world of Cottolengo itself is a fascinating creation, almost analogous with some of Calvino’s fantastic creations in his other fictions, particularly “Invisible Cities”. Here, he paints a place where the troubled can be cared for, kept safe from harm and given some kind of meaningful life. The question running through the book is one of agency; how much do the residents have, how much real understanding of the everyday life outside the walls of their world, and how much should they be involved in it. I don’t know that the book has an answer to that – we never learn the results of the election, and Amerigo doesn’t seem to come up with a solution – but “The Watcher” certainly provides much food for thought.

Although I know I’ve read this story before, it must have been pre-blog and I could recall nothing about it. However, I found it a fascinating and stimulating story, with some lovely writing and some really thought-provoking concepts being explored. The terminology *is* old-fashioned (and I can remember when we spoke like this) although, having said that, this might just reflect the character’s view and not necessarily that of the author himself. That’s by the by, really; I’m just glad to have been prompted into picking up another lesser-known Calvino and finding it as brilliant as his other writings. Can’t wait to see what the title is next month! 😀

“..the cemetery blossomed every night with wills-o’-the-wisp…” #calvinobookclub #theclovenviscount

2023 was a year where I spent many happy hours reacquainting myself with the works of Italo Calvino, many of which I hadn’t read in decades. It was of course the centenary of his birth, and Philip of the A Plunge into Calvino podcast hosted a Calvino Bookclub on Twitter/X where we read along with a work a month. It was great fun, so I was very pleased when he announced he would be rebooting this, starting with “The Cloven Viscount” for March. I suspect that I’ve only read this once, back in my twenties, so I was most interested to see what I would make of it!

First published in 1952, “Cloven” (here translated by Archibald Colquhoun) is generally collected with Calvino’s subsequent two novels “The Baron in the Trees” and “The Non-Existent Knight” into one volume under the umbrella title “Our Ancestors”; that’s the case with my old Picador edition. Up until this point, Calvino had been writing stories more rooted in realism, such as short stories and his first novel, “The Path to the Nest of Spiders”. However, his heart was obviously in what’s loosely labelled here as fantasy (thought it’s more like fairy tale) and with “Cloven” he took a step away from realism towards the great works he’s now best known for, which to my mind defy genre.

At 71 pages in my edition (admittedly with very small type), “Cloven” is really a novella and has a somewhat mediaeval setting. The story opens with Viscount Medardo travelling to fight the Turks on the plains of Bohemia; the battle is painted starkly and during the conflict, Medardo is literally cut into two lengthways by a cannonball. Miraculously, one half survives and this half a man returns to his country changed. With his missing half swathed in a billowing cloak, he brings terror to his people; cleaving living things into two, killing at will and exercising cruelty wherever he can, it’s obvious that the bad part of the man has survived.

Amazingly, however, it transpires that his other side is also still alive, and eventually makes his way home. This Medardo is good, yes, but unfortunately with a weakness that goes with the goodness. So he’s busily going around trying to make things better for the people, but not having the backbone to do so. Inevitably, both halves of the man fall in love with the beautiful Pamela, and although she prefers the good half, she’s being pressured into marrying the bad one. A crisis will be reached during the wedding day – but which half will Pamela marry, and is there any redemption possibly for this divided soul?

“Cloven” is of course a moral fable about human nature, with the ultimate conclusion being that we are made up of both good and bad aspects, a yin and ying which complement each other; and so nobody can be entirely good or entirely bad. (I’m not sure I necessarily buy that, if I’m honest – even if Hitler was good to his mother, I’m not inclined to think of him as anything else but evil incarnate). In Calvino’s story, both halves are lacking and it’s only by bringing them back together that anything can be done to resolve the situation. It’s a fairly simple message but so beautifully and elegantly told!

Calvino’s writing is a joy to read, and there are so many interesting elements built in. There is a leper colony, a kind of trope of mediaeval tales maybe, but Calvino handles it in an intriguing way, maybe offering some kind of hope to the sufferers. The character of Dr. Trelawney is perhaps a tribute to Robert Louis Stevenson; he enters and leaves the story via a sailing ship, surely a reference to Squire Trelawney from “Treasure Island”. And the presence of exiled Huguenots adds another aspect to the story, with their potential for friendshop with the local peasants, but a certain wariness between both camps.

My edition of “Our Ancestors” comes with a foreword by Calvino, and here he discusses the fact that he was using the fairy tale format to comment on his times. Certainly, the landscape he describes is based on his childhood home in San Remo on the Italian Riviera and I can see how its loss (which he refers to here) informed his story “A Plunge Into Real Estate” which I wrote about last year. Using a fantastic tale to comment on reality has a long pedigree, but I would argue that few have done it as deftly as Calvino does here.

“The Cloven Viscount” is a short, entertaining and rather thought-provoking tale, and while not necessarily of the same standard as his later writings, it certainly was an enjoyable read. Calvino relates how there was something of an outcry when it was published, as it was such a dramatic change in his style. Me, I’m glad he moved away from realism into exploring much more interesting forms of writing. I’m looking forward to continuing my rediscovery of his work this year, and hopefully all of the titles chosen will be as good as this!

“…stick to what I see.” #calvinobookclub #mrpalomar

I have to confess that I got a little emotional last week, on 19th September, when I was reminded by #BookTwitter peeps that it was the anniversary of the death of Italo Calvino. He died back in 1985 and the day I found out is etched in my brain (as I recalled when I made a guest appearance on the A Plunge Into Calvino podcast). I’ve had an intellectual crush on him since I first read “If on a winter’s night a traveller“, and so in 1985 I was very, very excited as a new Calvino title was coming out in translation soon; that book was “Mr. Palomar” (translated by William Weaver) and it turned out to be the last of Calvino’s books published in his lifetime. I revisited this one briefly in the early days of the blog, but I was pleased that Philip at the podcast chose “Palomar” as this month’s Calvino Book Club read; I’ve found that my recent re-reads of the great author’s works have revealed so much more than my earlier explorations, and I approached this one hoping that would be the same!

“Mr Palomar” is a collection of pieces about the thoughts and adventures of the titular character. ‘Adventures’ is perhaps too strong a word; as is stated early in the book:

A nervous man who lives in frenzied and congested world, Mr Palomar tends to reduce his relations with the outside world; and to defend himself against the general neurasthenia he tries to keep his sensations under control insofar as possible.

So the short pieces, each with a title like ‘Reading the wave’. ‘The contemplation of the stars’, or ‘From the terrace’, allow Palomar to contemplate the world, elements within it and the meanings of things. His musings are often debunked with a little wry humour from the author, but it’s clear that the man is something of an overthinker! The story sequence progresses through overarching categories, with three overall sections subdivided into sets of three stories, each with a subtitle gathering them together. Yes, we’re dealing with an Oulipian writer, but this structure never gets in the way of the beauty of the stories.

..in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object.

Mr Palomar takes his name, of course, from a favourite telescope, and certainly in the beginning sections of the book this is very relevant. He takes a close up, precise look at things, trying to pin down what he sees as a kind of way to control nature and the world around him. Hence his attempt in the first piece to try to observe a single wave; but of course it is impossible to see just one, or indeed to contain the sea (and the world!) as everything is interconnected. So Palomar continues to train his telescopic eye on a variety of everyday phenomena and keeps trying to focus on the singular and individual; however his vision is constantly swept up by the universal. Whether a wave or a blade of grass, he can’t see them except in relation to all other waves and grasses.

As you read through the stories, they gradually take on a wider view of things; Palomar observes the stars in the sky, the roofscapes of the city, and in the final sections of the book ‘The Silences of Palomar’ his viewpoint becomes wider. In his search for the individual, he stars to realise that the individual *is* universal. While observing a Japanese sand garden, surrounded by a large group of tourists who totally obliterate the ability to use the place as intended i.e. to meditate, he sees the mass of humanity as a collection of grains of sand – and so maybe the point of his explorations is to reveal that we are all one, interrelated, and will stand or fall together. Palomar’s journey seems to have been one of seeking to find the perfectability of the real world, and inevitably failing.

If this sounds heavy or complex, of course it’s not – we’re reading Calvino with his light touch on the heaviest of subjects. The writing can be so lyrical, for example the breathtakingly beautiful and evocative descriptions of the city skyline and upper areas. And as I mentioned, there is plenty of wry humour in the book; Palomar regularly attracts the attention of others because of his odd behaviour. Whether making a bit of a spectacle of himself whilst star gazing, or unintentionally behaving suspiciously whilst trying to decide the best way to react to a sunbather with a bared breast, Palomar is something of a loveable bumbler.

By Fotograf: Johan Brun, Dagbladet (Oslo Museum/Digitalt Museum) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

Inevitably, I found it impossible here not to conflate author and character; Mrs Palomar and a daughter are mentioned, which ties in with Calvino’s family structure, and Palomar as the observer, keeping something of a distance, reads to me like Calvino himself, who as an author preferred to keep a low profile. Certainly, the ending lines are poignantly powerful – I shall say no more, but it made me even more emotional about the author than I was.

A model is by definition that which works perfectly; whereas reality, as we see clearly, does not work and constantly falls to pieces; so we must force it, more or less roughly, to assume the form of the model.

Whether contemplating the universe, or considering the different varieties of cheeses, Palomar could perhaps be the ultimate observer, locked in a world of his own and trying to find harmony in his surroundings. Was this book perhaps Calvino’s final statement of his philosophy? I don’t know – however, I do know that once again I’ve pages of notes from a re-read of one of his works, and I’m seeing so many more layers in it than I did on my previous visits. The book has an index at the end, and a note on the structure which breaks down the pieces into sections exploring visual experiences, anthropological elements and more speculative experiences (those which explore the cosmos, as Calvino states). But consistent to all is human curiosity, the need to observe, contemplate and try to make sense of life. “Mr Palomar” is a beautiful book, and a fine one to stand as his last published work – his too early death was a great loss to world culture.

*****

As I mentioned earlier in the year, in my review of “The Written World and the Unwritten World“, I was excited to find that it featured two previous untranslated pieces featuring Palomar; and the notes tended to indicate that there were a whole series of these. This does rather reinforce my feeling that the character was a stand-in for the author, and I can only hope that one day more untranslated musings of Mr. Palomar will make it into English!! 😀

 

Summer’s end, plus autumn plans! 🍂🍂📚📚

August has been an odd kind of month, particularly weather-wise – in this country, at least, we’ve not had the huge heat we had earlier in the year and some of the days have been quite fresh (which I haven’t minded, as I actually don’t enjoy the heat that much). So as we draw nearer to the end of summer and autumn comes into sight, I must say I’m not entirely sorry! However, on the reading front, August has been quite magnificent as you can see from this rather large pile!!!

It has indeed been a heck of a month for reading, and I have absolutely loved the variety of works I enjoyed. I must point out that I only read the first four chapters of “Dombey and Son”; although of course I read the whole of “Hard Times”. There’s been plenty of wonderful classic women’s writing from Russia, England, Japan and America; GA crime; poetry; non-fiction covering all manner of topics; and of course a stupendous re-read of one of my favourite books ever, “If on a winter’s night a traveller“. Not a dud or a dull moment in there!! And yes, I have a lot of catch-up reviewing to do…

With the return to work looming, I expect September to be less of a bumper month for reading, although I *do* have plans! First of all, there is the read for the #Calvinobookclub. I must admit to having been very pleased when it was announced this would be “Mr Palomar“; this was the last novel published in the author’s lifetime, and the first I was able to buy on publication, so it has a special place in my heart. Again, this is a title I’ve re-read in the time of the blog, but it was some time ago; so I’m very keen to see what I think of it!

As for other plans, my head has been very much in OuLiPian mode recently, and when I was shuffling the book piles recently I came across a batch of exciting titles:

I’ve had these for a couple of years, and when having a flick through was ridiculously excited to find that one contains a piece written by Calvino about how he structured “If on a winter’s night a traveller” – so I may have to be spending time with some of these lovelies.

And then there are the Big Books! I have been threatening to share more about these on the Ramblings, and this particular current obsession was fuelled by embarking upon “Middlemarch” and also watching the videos of Benjamin McEvoy. I was so inspired by his encouragement to read big classics that I went on a rampage through Mount TBR and gathered together a couple of towering piles of chunksters and classics which are still waiting to be read – and a huge and scary heap they make!!

Here’s the left pile:

And here’s the right:

I think if you click on them you’ll get a bigger view…

Now, these *do* look a tad intimidating; but in my current frame of mind, I am feeling the urge to get some of these classics read, and certainly the serial reading option is helping so far. The first book of “Middlemarch” was wonderful, and I have also embarked on “Dombey and Son” (thoughts on the first four chapters to follow). Of course, this is something of a long-term project; but if I can read some of these alongside other, shorter books, I shall finally be able to enjoy books I’ve had lurking for so long. Anyway, that’s where I am at the moment with the plan – we’ll see how it pans out…

Any other plans for September? Well Stu is hosting a Czech Literature Month and I intend to take part in that if I can; and in fact, a new arrival this week would fit the bill perfectly:

Apart from that, I shall start planning for our next Club Reading Week; I’ll be co-hosting this with Simon from Stuck in a Book from 16-22 October, and the year we’re reading from this time is 1962. I already have some ideas about suitable titles and it should be such fun!

So what about you? How was your August, and what are looking to read as we move into autumn?? 😀😉

“…confronting something and not quite knowing yet what it is.” #calvinobookclub

When Philip at the “A Plunge Into Calvino” podcast announced that the August read for the Italo Calvino bookclub would be “If on a winter’s night a traveller” I was in two minds about whether I wanted to read this again. I’ve always reckoned it to be my favourite Calvino book, and I have a long history with it, back to the time I first read it and it completely changed the way I thought about books and reading. However, it felt as if I’d re-read it fairly recently (certainly within the time of this blog) and so I wasn’t sure if I was in the right headspace to revisit a book which meant so much to me. However with a little encouragement from Philip I decided that I would, and to make the reread even more special I indulged myself by sending off for a lovely Everyman hardback edition (translated by William Weaver) which I thought might make the reread even better. Well, whatever edition I chose to read the revisit was something else, as I’ll try to convey in this post!

Very pretty Everyman hardback…

“Traveller…” was first published in 1979, and when it was recommended to me by a colleague of Mr. K’s, it was in terms of “If she likes books about books, she’ll love this” (they were not wrong…) In simple terms, the book tells the story of a Reader who is trying to read “If on a winter’s night a traveller”, the new book by Italo Calvino. He negotiates the snares of the bookshop to buy a copy, settles down to begin the book and is captivated by the first chapter. However, here his problems start… The book is faulty, with the same section bound into the volume over and over again. He returns to the bookstore to try and get a replacement copy, but is told that mistakes at the printers mean that this is not the Calvino and so he is provided with what is supposed to be the correct book. He and a fellow Other Reader (who receives a name, Ludmilla) try to carry on with their reading…

Alas, this is the first of a chain of faults or issues which results in the Reader never being able to read more than a chapter of a book before being interrupted; and the adventures of the Reader, the Other Reader and several other characters in pursuit of the finished book, or indeed any finished book, become wilder and wilder. Alternating numbered chapters and titled stories take the external reader on a labyrinthine journey through countries, times, political situations and all manner of dramas – will the Readers ever catch up with the book(s) and how on earth is Calvino going to finish the story!?

That’s perhaps a slightly surface level look at what this book is about, because frankly it would probably take me a week’s worth of long post to get anywhere near discussing the many levels of what is a quite dazzling and multifaceted book, and as far as I’m concerned a work of genius. It was my first experience of any kind of metafiction, and the first page still leaves me breathless – the opening sentences sets the tone:

You are about to begin reading Italo Calvino’s new novel, If on a winter’s night a traveler. Relax. Concentrate. Dispel every other thought. Let the world around you fade. Best to close the door; the TV is always on in the next room. Tell the others right away, “No, I don’t want to watch TV!” Raise your voice—they won’t hear you otherwise—“I’m reading! I don’t want to be disturbed!” Maybe they haven’t heard you, with all that racket; speak louder, yell: “I’m beginning to read Italo Calvino’s new novel!” Or if you prefer, don’t say anything; just hope they’ll leave you alone.

This chapter goes on to relate how you (is this you, the external reader, or the Reader who will become the protagonist of the story??) have made your way through the stacks of books in the bookstore fighting for your attention, triumphantly bringing home the Calvino; and it’s a chapter which will resonate with any book obsessive! And the opening lines of the first of the sub-stories, ‘If on a winter’s night a traveller’ does the same thing:

The novel begins in a railway station, a locomotive huffs, steam from a piston covers the opening of the chapter, a cloud of smoke hides part of the first paragraph. In the odor of the station there is a passing whiff of station café odor. There is someone looking through the befogged glass, he opens the glass door of the bar, everything is misty, inside, too, as if seen by nearsighted eyes, or eyes irritated by coal dust. The pages of the book are clouded like the windows of an old train, the cloud of smoke rests on the sentences. It is a rainy evening; the man enters the bar; he unbuttons his damp overcoat; a cloud of steam enfolds him; a whistle dies away along tracks that are glistening with rain, as far as the eye can see.

Again, the novel is talking about itself, and this was a revelation to me. But it needs to be recognised that first and foremost, “Traveller” is a book about reading, the importance of books and reading, and how each reader is an individual with an individual response. The framing device employed here allows Calvino to explore a rich selection of different stories and indeed different types of storytelling (I keep coming back to what a remarkable storyteller he was, don’t I?) Each novel ‘beginning’ is stylistically different; for example, the narrator of “Leaning”, an invalid by the sea, is very precise, trying to control what he sees as chaos around him; and “Around” struck me as somewhat Borgesian; whereas the opening title story is more of a spy story. Calvino’s playfulness comes to the fore here, and I couldn’t help thinking he was having great fun with all these different styles of storytelling.

…you seem to be lost in the book with white pages, unable to get out of it.

You might ask whether it’s a little annoying just having fragments to read but I don’t find this so. Each story breaks off at a pivotal point leading the Reader (and this reader!) very much wanting to know what happens next. Yet somehow the fragments manage to be complete within themselves. As I’ve mentioned, the range of stories is really varied: from spy style narratives through tales of country feuds, a love triangle in revolutionary times, a murder mystery, a tale of a man being pursued by ringing telephones, a Japanese setting to a surreal tale of non-existence, the fertility of Calvino’s brain is stunning. Interestingly, one strand of the book explores the idea that all stories come from one source, with a Father of Stories being sought – I rather think Calvino could qualify for that role!

These individual tales are counterpointed with the chapters about the Reader; as the book progresses, his search for a complete book become as wild and fantastic as some of the stories themselves – which could be (fictional) life imitating art and who knew that reading could be so dangerous! It’s worth noting that this multifaceted narrative involves Calvino the actual author (or does it?), his representative in the book, the Reader, the female Other Reader, the selection of characters in each sub-story and of course the External Reader – yourself! Despite the potential for an overcomplex book, Calvino as always handles his material with a brilliantly light touch.

Another fascinating aspect which is much to the fore in “Traveller” is that of the concept of authenticity, with sub-plots concerning conspiracies, political shenanigans, censorship and whether it matters who actually wrote the book. A translator called Ermes Marana appears at junctures, and seems to be responsible for all manner of falsifications, so much so that certain regimes are hunting him though he’s remarkably elusive. If I’m correct, Calvino’s personal belief was that the author should be fairly invisible, a preference echoed by the Other Reader, Ludmilla, and maybe in our modern world of unlimited visibility we need to remind ourselves that it’s the text that matters. There’s a eerily prescient element recurring in the narratives too, where Calvino introduces bookish technologies which can imitate the style of authors so that computers can write books – another version of the Death of the Author, maybe, and rather pre-empting modern AI!! Calvino also tackles the issue of the sheer amount of books being published, something also very relevant nowadays with our modern publishing methods and plethora of texts appearing left, right and centre…

…the author of every book is a fictitious character whom the existent author invents to make him the author of his fictions.

One of the most interesting chapters for me was the one which was narrated as if from the diary of the author Silas Flannery, one of the writers who recurs throughout the book. This particular chapter really allowed Calvino to explore so many elements of writing and reading and books, and with his need for seclusion and a certain anonymity, I couldn’t help reading this as a sly self-portrait of Calvino himself. Certainly, one of the paragraphs from Flannery’s journal seems to relate to what we might be reading at the moment…

The romantic fascination produced in the pure state by the first sentences of the first chapter of many novels is soon lost in the continuation of the story: it is the promise of a time of reading that extends before us and can comprise all possible developments. I would like to be able to write a book that is only an incipit, that maintains for its whole duration the potentiality of the beginning, the expectation still not focused on an object. But how could such a book be constructed? Would it break off after the first paragraph? Would the preliminaries be prolonged indefinitely? Would it set the beginning of one tale inside another, as in the Arabian Nights?

As I revisited “Traveller” I had to keep stopping and taking a breath to let myself properly digest what I’d just read and make sure I didn’t gobble it down. Although I’ve read this book several times, my last visit was actually in the very early days of this blog, about 11 years ago, and I am certainly reading Calvino with much more attention nowadays. Each re-read of this book brings out more depth and layers, and I was consistently struck by how clever it is – even as you are drawn into and involved with each tale, Calvino constantly reminds you that this is a construct, distancing you from the narrative you’re enjoying but never making it any less compelling. Yet I found I had forgotten the specifics of some of the books the Reader was trying to read and at times felt as if I was encountering the book for the first time, which was quite marvellous. The ending knocked me out completely; I was wondering how Calvino could end such a book, which had become wilder and wilder, but he did it brilliantly and I was left wanting to go back to the start and begin reading all over again!!

In reading, something happens over which I have no power.

Mr K’s colleague was right about this being a book about books, as at the heart of “Traveller” is, I think, the importance of storytelling in our life. Calvino’s audacious explorations of reading and writing and why we do both are thought-provoking and unforgettable. The continuing sequence of issues getting in the way of the reading shows how dependent we are nowadays on many other entities to hear those stories – publishers, printers, bookshops, translators, censors… The element of translation was particularly interesting, with one of the stories depending entirely on the ability of a professor of a dead language to translate a book accurately, and this did remind me of how much I rely on translators (thank you, William Weaver, for all the work you did for Calvino’s books.)

Minerva, original Picador, Vintage editions

I’ll stop here before this post gets any longer, though I am so knocked out by my re-read that I could go on forever (and my book hangover is going to take ages to go away). “If on a winter’s night a traveller” is absolutely dazzling in its conception and execution; an unbelievably clever and complex yet completely readable book, a real masterwork. I have nothing but sheer admiration not only for the fertility of Calvino’s mind, thinking up each of these potential stories, but also his skill in constructing such a narrative. Since I first encountered this book, I’ve read all manner of OuLiPo works using constraints, meta techniques and the like, and I suspect that’s led me to revisit “Traveller” with greater experience and understanding. I probably responded more to it on an emotional level back in my twenties; now I’m looking at it with both emotions and intellect; certainly, I made dozens of pages of notes/quotes while I was reading it, and I could have stuffed this post with quotations. “If on a winter’s night a traveller” is definitely one of the most important books in my life, to which I hope I’ve done justice here, and my re-read has made me appreciate it even more. Perhaps I should spend the rest of the year reading nothing but Calvino….

*****

I wrote this review ‘blind’, you might say, straight after finishing the book, without reading my previous post on it, nor the introduction to the Everyman edition. So what you have above is my unfiltered response! On the subject of the Everyman, it made very easy and pleasant reading – their hardbacks are comfortable to hold, pages flop open nicely, and I was relieved not to have to risk my fragile and a bit crumbly original Picador which is old but precious!

However, I did notice a slight difference between some of my editions. In both the Picador (from 1982) and the Everyman, the contents page and the book itself has the ‘ordinary’ chapters given as Chapter one, Chapter two etc. However, the Minerva and Vintage editions simply have 1, 2, 3 etc. A minor point, maybe, but I wonder why?

July thoughts and August plans… 📚📚📚🚂

July is always a bit of an odd month for me; working in a school as I do there’s always a mad panic to get everything done before the end of term and then the sudden relaxation when the summer holidays hit! This year was no different and things were particularly intense leading up to the break – which may be why I lost myself in books so much whenever I could find the time. Anyway, here are the books I read during the month and a wonderful selection they were too!

As you can see, this is quite a chunky pile and I should say upfront that I have *not* read the whole of “Middlemarch“. After a lot of umming and ahing, I have decided to read it serially (more of which in a later post) and so I have read the first book! The rest of the month was a wonderfully mixed bunch – “Night Walking” was of course an epic read, and caused some of the subsequent reading; then there was classic crime, humour, travel and nature writing, poetry, plus a title which defies description! A highlight was my re-read of “Invisible Cities” by Calvino – what a genius that man was!

August is when I traditionally pop to the Midlands to visit my Aged Parent and also the Offspring, and hopefully this month will be the same (although it may be a slightly truncated trip this year because of other commitments). However, train travel is great because I can read up a storm – hurrah! I’ve tended to take a chunkster with me on my travels in the past, but am not sure what I’ll read this time round – but let’s explore some possibles…

First up, August is, of course, Women in Translation month, hosted by Meytal Radzinski. I read WIT books the year round, but it’s always nice to focus on them particularly during the month. I have, as usual, pulled together a bunch of possibles (some of which, I hate to confess, have been on the pile for a couple of years) and there are some interesting titles featured:

Another reading event which takes place in August is run by the LibraryThing Virago Modern Classics group, and it’s called “All Virago/All August“. The idea is to read lots of Virago or related books although I never stick to one thing for a month. However, I still have plenty of unread books from the publisher lurking on the shelves and this one caught my eye:

I was reminded of Mew when she was mentioned in the interesting Sky Arts progs on the reopening of the National Portrait Gallery; it’s a bit of a chunkster, which I’ve meant to read for quite some time, but we’ll see how things go…

Apart from that, I’ve ended up with a big pile of possibilities following my reading of “Night Walking“; that book sent me off on several tangents, and I’ll share my thoughts about the book itself and the two titles it prompted me to pick up during August. However, I still have this little pile to consider:

Some of these would be re-reads, some I have to confess are recent purchases, and they’re all very intriguing.

The August title for the Calvino Book Club read has been announced and it’s “If on a winter’s night a traveller” which was, of course, my first ever Calvino! I’ve re-read it several times, including during the time of the blog, but I think I shall give it another revisit. I’m seeing so much more in his other titles, so it will be interesting to discover what I feel about the book in this light! 😊

And finally, I’m left with these chunky titles which were possibles in my end of June post, to which has been added an even chunkier title which I mentioned at the start of this post. I do want to get back into reading chunksters…

All of them are very tempting. Plus there are a good number of British Library Crime Classics and British Library Women Writers waiting too. Even with it being the summer holidays, I am going to struggle to read everything I want – I shall no doubt have to give up sleeping!

So, do any of the above take your fancy? And what are you planning to read during August?? 😊🤔

“…spiderwebs of intricate relationships seeking a form.” #calvinobookclub #invisiblecities

Approaching my re-read of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” as part of the #CalvinoBookClub July read was a nerve-wracking experience; the book is rightly regarded as a masterpiece, an incredibly influential work, and this was my first revisit to it for decades. As I’ve found with all of the Calvinos I’ve returned to this year, he’s an author whose depths I really hadn’t appreciated, and I’ve discovered so much more than I’d remembered in his books. So coming back to “Invisible Cities” made me very nervous – how would I feel about it now, all those years later, and what would I get from it? Frankly, I needn’t have worried – I need to trust in the genius of Calvino and know that I’m going to love his writing all over again!

First published in 1972, my version is a Picador edition from 1974 translated by Calvino’s long-term collaborator William Weaver. The book is structured around exchanges between Kublai Khan and Marco Polo, as the latter returns from his travels and describes to the emperor the cities which he’s visited, The cities are named within the text, though the table of contents simply lists them by their attributes: ‘Cities and memories’, ‘Cities and desire’, ‘Trading cities’, ‘Thin cities’ etc., each differentiated with a number. The meetings are based on historical fact, as Polo acted as Khan’s emissary back in the 1200s and he travelled widely, so you would expect these glittering descriptions of cities to be an interesting look into the past.

Your gaze scans the streets as if they were written pages: the city says everything you must think, makes you repeat her discourse, and while you believe you are visiting Tamara you are only recording the names with which she defines herself and all her parts.

Yet almost immediately Calvino brings you up short, jerking you out of the past, by having Polo describe cities with skyscrapers, the Underground, radar and the like, and it soon becomes clear this is no traditional book (but would you be expecting that from Calvino?) The cities described are extraordinary and all different, despite being categorised into certain groups. The ‘Cities and the dead’, for example, explore the boundaries between the living and the dead, often with mirror cities for both; some places are hard to find and even harder to leave; ‘Thin Cities’ were a particular favourite of mine, often constructed from pipes and wires and pulleys and not much else, and they were amongst the most dazzling and inventive.

Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, their rules are absurd, their perspectives deceitful, and everything conceals something else.

What hit me most, revisiting this book, was the power of Calvino’s imagination; he had the extraordinary ability to spin visions out of words, creating fabulous landscapes in exquisite and evocative prose. Each short description of a place (and I’m not sure if any are more than a page long) is a wonderful invention on its own and tells, in its limited format, a complete story. Ah yes – I come back to storytelling again, an element I’m recognising more and more in Calvino’s work as I revisit it. What a fertile mind he had, and “Cities” is slightly reminiscent of ‘1001 Nights’, with a storyteller entertaining an emperor; although that aspect itself warrants more thought…

This book is, of course, a construct containing a series of unreliable narrators – Khan, Polo and of course Calvino himself are plucking stories out of the air and although Polo is ostensibly describing places he’s seen, they don’t seem to have any kind of concrete reality or location (and indeed how could they, bearing in mind that Polo would need to be a time traveller to see some of things he describes!) Is he conjuring cities as phantoms to entertain Khan? What is reality and what is fantasy? Are all cities the same and is each individual city different for everyone? Are these various cityscapes simply aspects of Venice, Polo’s home city from which he was in exile for many years? And is a journey of the mind just as rewarding a one as a physical journey?

You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints the old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.

At some points, the roles switch and Khan begins to imagine cities and ask Polo if they exist. And eventually both characters come to doubt whether either is there and indeed where they are; it seems as if these cities are invisible because they only exist in the mind’s eye of Polo and Khan, whoever or wherever they are. But whether real or imagined, the evocative pictures of strange, exotic, dark and mysterious cities are painted vividly in the mind and linger there. Like Escher or Piranesi, Calvino creates the most wonderful settings, but all in words – remarkable.

There is no language without deceit.

“Invisible Cities” is an intriguing work from the point of view of Calvino’s attitude to cities themselves; he’d already displaying complex thoughts about urban living in “Marcovaldo“, which I reviewed earlier in the year, and he does manage to sneak in something of a critique of modern consumer society in places. He seems to be both drawn to and repelled by the idea of massive settlements; yet even back in historical times, humans grouped themselves together like this. The bottom line, perhaps, is that cities, whatever form they take, are gatherings of people – without them, they fall into decay.

Falsehood is never in words; it is in things.

I realised, reaching the end of “Cities”, that I’d only scratched the surface and that it would take multiple readings to truly understand and appreciate the brilliance and complexity of this book. For example, Lisa (who was reading the book too) flagged up on Twitter the fact that the cities all seem to have women’s names, which I hadn’t picked up on; but this adds another element as many of these are related to history and myth e.g Baucis, so another reading of the book, exploring each city name’s origin, could reveal even more layers. And a quick explore online discloses that there was a deliberate Oulipian mathematical structure in the ordering of the appearance of the cities which warrants more investigation!

By Fotograf: Johan Brun, Dagbladet (Oslo Museum/Digitalt Museum) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons

“Invisible Cities” is a slim but mighty book and it’s clear to see why it’s been so influential; there’s so much packed into its 127 pages that I think you could spent years deciphering it. However, putting all of that aside, I feel that you can still read it simply and get so much pure enjoyment out of it. Calvino’s imagination is sparkling, the places he creates are unforgettable and he’s a stellar storyteller; for sheer invention he can’t be beaten. Reading Calvino in his centenary year is reminding me just why I love him so much and why his books would be high on my desert island list; if there were only his books left in the world to read, I could revisit them over and over again, and never be bored!! 😀

*****

The Calvino Book Club is being hosted on Twitter by Philip Marsh of the “A Plunge Into Calvino” podcast (on which I was happy to guest!) You can find the podcast here (and on whatever podcast platform you use to listen to these) and Philip here – do join in and read along if you can!

“…suspended in a journey that had not ended nor was to end.” #calvinobookclub

Today I’m continuing on with my revisits to the works of Italo Calvino, not only to celebrate his centenary year, but also to read along where I can with the #Calvinobookclub on Twitter (hosted by the A Plunge Into Calvino podcast @calvinopodcast). This month’s book is a slim but very thought-provoking work, and it’s another one which I’ve not revisited for decades – in fact, probably not since my initial read of it. The title is “The Castle of Crossed Destinies”, rendered into English by Calvino’s regular translator, William Weaver, and I found it fascinating.

The book is actually split into two sections; the first titular one contains eight stories; the second, entitled “The Tavern of Crossed Destinies”, also has eight. Each tale is illustrated in the margins with images of tarot cards, and it’s those cards which structure and inform the whole book. The story opens with a traveller, our narrator, taking refuge in a castle in the middle of a forest; here, he not only finds himself amongst a disparate group of people, he also discovers that he (as well as they) have lost the power of speech. Humans, of course, have a need to communicate and it seems as though all of these people want to tell their stories. The only method they have appears to be a set of Tarot cards, and the characters begin to lay out the cards in such a way as to relate their experiences; this is, of course, subject to how our narrator interprets these layouts… And so the series of stories begins.

“…to the pale fields of the Moon, where an endless storeroom preserves in phials placed in rows” (as in the Cups card) “the stories that men do not live, the thoughts that knock once at the threshold of awareness and vanish forever, the particles of the possible discarded in the game of combinations, the solutions that could be reached but are never reached. . . .”

The titles of the tales do reveal much of what these stories will contain: “The Tale of the Alchemist who Sold his Soul” transpires to be that of Faust; “The Tale of Roland Crazed with Love” runs into the subsequent “The Tale of Astolpho on the Moon”, both of which draw characters from The Song of Roland and the era of Charlemagne. Later stories intermingle Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Macbeth and Lear; and the fated Oedipus makes an appearance too. As the tellers of tales lay out their cards, these sequences create an overall whole, a pattern of cards containing each of the stories, suggesting that all of the experiences in the world can be contained in the Tarot deck – it’s a fascinating concept.

There is no better place to keep a secret than in an unfinished novel.

The first section of stories ends with the cards being shuffled and the narrative returning to the beginning; however the “Tavern…” stories go off in something of a different direction. While the tales are still interwoven with the Tarot cards, the narrator seems to take a little more control, and in a long section towards the end attempts to tell his own tale. Here, there is much exploration of the art of storytelling, of being a writer and the difficulties that brings, and there are many meta elements here. What was initially a somewhat mediaeval tale allows modern elements to seep in, and there are times when the narrator (who it’s hard not to conflate with Calvino) comments on the way he’s allowing the story to go, how he’s manipulating the cards, and even how he might consider drawing in classical art by using paintings to tell the tales. Now that would have made a fascinating twist to this book!

In writing, what speaks is what is repressed.

When I picked up “Castle…” I did wonder how I would get on with it. The book is a Calvino I could recall little about, but I did expect there to be many references built into the text and I was concerned I might miss any. Well, maybe I have, but I don’t know that that matters, because my feeling about “Castle…” is that it’s a book all about storytelling, our need to tell tales to each other and our desperation to communicate when it seems impossible. The point of the structure of the book seems to be to arrange all of the cards into a pattern which contains all histories, which does beg the question as to whether the guests are actually telling their stories or whether the cards are creating the guests’ lives. The Tarot can be read in multiple directions; the images can interpreted in countless ways; and so each tale could be nebulous and dependant on each individual’s subjective reading of the cards. Maybe the point is to teach us that *all* stories are a question of interpretation.

…the job of writing makes individual lives uniform, one man at a desk resembles every other man at a desk.

As with everything I’ve ever read of Calvino’s work, this was quite brilliant and I could have pulled out so many more quotes here than I have. The more I revisit his books, the more I come to think that so much of what he was doing was about the art of storytelling itself, and “Castle…” not only shows what wonderful tales Calvino could spin out of anything, but also demonstrates our need as a race to tell stories. He provides a note at the end of the book explaining his process of writing “Castle…” and how once the need to construct a work this way came to him he had no choice but to do so to stop it bothering him. Of the books I’ve been reading recently by him, I think it’s the one with the most obvious OuLiPian constraint, and it works quite brilliantly; an absolutel marvellous read, and I’m looking forward to seeing which book is chosen for July’s #Calvinobookclub!

*****

I wanted to add a coda to my post on the subject of the physical book itself, how the edition is structured and how that affected my reading of it. My edition is a Picador from 1977 and it has really quite small type. As I mentioned, the book has images of the Tarot cards which relate to the text running down the margins, and in some cases representations of the full deck laid out with an indication of the stories woven into this design. This is particularly relevant, as Calvino says at the start of his note, “This book is made first of pictures…” and I suspect that unless you have a very vivid visual imagination and know what the cards look like, you’ll be relying on these images as you read through the book. However, I suggest you avoid the digital book as I believe it completely omits the pictures, which is shocking.

The trouble is, to be honest, that the pictures in my edition are very small and in b/w. Couple this with the small type and it *does* make the reading experience quite difficult. I believe there’s another edition, with some colour plates, and I’m trying to track this down. However, I do feel that this book is crying out for a decent illustrated edition – a Folio Society one, maybe? – with nice sized text and larger, more legible (maybe even colour) pictures of the cards alongside the text. Frankly, I doubt that will happen, as I don’t think “Castle…” is regarded as one of his major works. That’s a shame, though, as I found it fascinating, thought-provoking, clever and very human. Fingers crossed that I can at least locate the edition with the colour images!

Plunging into Calvino – the second part of my podcast guest appearance!!!! 😀 @calvinopodcast

Following on from last week’s arrival of the first part of my podcast guest appearance, part two is now up and live! So you can hear me rambling away with podcaster Philip Marsh about ‘Cosmicomics’, a favourite of Calvino book, ‘Invisible Cities’ and much more.

As Philip explained, it may be that the two parts don’t marry up completely as the original recording of the first part went mysteriously AWOL and so we had to re-record it. But hopefully you’ll enjoy listening to us conversing about Calvino (and plenty of other topics) so do go and have a listen – you can find part two here. And, of course, as I said before, try to read some Calvino in his centenary year – there are rich reading rewards awaiting you!!

Plunging into Calvino – in which I make a rare podcast guest appearance!!!! 😀 @calvinopodcast

Regular Ramblings readers will no doubt have noticed the focus so far this year on Italo Calvino, one of my favourite authors whose centenary year 2023 just happens to be! I’ve been following the A Plunge Into Calvino podcast, and also the #CalvinoBookclub which podcaster Philip Marsh has been hosting on Twitter. So when Philip asked if I would like to be a guest on the Plunge podcast, I was keen to get involved!

Now, I’m not a regular podcaster – in fact, I’ve only ever taken part in one before, when I was a guest on Simon at Stuck in a Book’s ‘Tea or Books’, all the way back in 2018 – so I was a little bit uncertain as how it would go, as no-one really likes the sound of their own voice, do they! However, all went well and the podcast was recorded in two parts – well, actually in three, as there was a slight mishap as Philip explains at the beginning of part one!! 🤣🤣

So the first part of the podcast is now available here and if you fancy listening to us rambling on about Calvino (and plenty of other topics) do go and have a listen. And, of course, try to read some Calvino in his centenary year!