Word: calvino
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Thanks to the time warp of translation, not all new books by Italo Calvino that appear in English are actually new. Both Marcovaldo (1983) and Difficult Loves (1984) offered short stories that the Italian author wrote more than two decades ago, when his talents were entertainingly restricted to earthly realities. Mr. Palomar, on the other hand, belongs to the later vintage of Calvino's fiction. Like such works as Cosmicomics (1968) and Invisible Cities (1974), this novel uses the recognizable world primarily as an excuse for the launching of antic metaphysics...
...between Arezzo and Siena. To prevent his English from becoming too Italianized, he makes yearly trips to New York City, where he consults with his most "nurturing" publisher, Harcourt Brace Jovanovich's Helen Wolff. When Weaver is not translating such writers as Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante and Italo Calvino, he reads vast quantities of American mysteries, which he reviews for the London Financial Times. "Crime books," he maintains, "are very good at keeping you abreast of what people are saying back home...
...remaining third of Difficult Loves was written in the fifties, when Calvino began to break from realism for the richer depths of philosophy, myth and fantasy. These stores are all similarly titled "Adventure of a...", and explore similar ideas, the brief moments of universal comprehension and ignorance arising from everyday life...
...Adventure of a Photographer", a maniacal tale of two-dimensional artistic obsession, is one of the finest short stories Calvino has written, certainly superior to Julio Cortazar's celebrated photo story "Blow-Up." In the latter, a photographer tries to piece together the reality behind a photograph, but Calvino's protagonist goes one better, trying to discover the reality to photograph. The coldest, funniest, and only perfect story in this volume, "Photographer" is fast climbing on my Hot 100 of the Twentieth Century...
...toads and earthworms, to a modest clerk fresh from a one night stand, the characters of Difficult Loves scurry about their lives searching for human communication. Not a surprising theme for an author who has long been fascinated by the semiotic side of life. Like fellow Italian Umberto Eco, Calvino is as interested in how we mean something as in what we mean. In Calvino's world, a ship can show the truth like a book, and a pair of glasses can block recognition better than a wall...