Word: palomar
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MYOPIC MODERN HERO; Einstein on the beach without a paradigm; Steven Jay Gould gone off the deep end in search of the gecko and the albino gorilla--the name of this man is Mr. Palomar...
These stories are the 27 labors of Mr. Palomar, held in focus by the farsighted vision of Italo Calvino, each sketch revealing a little more of Mr. Palomar's idiosyncratic view of the world...
...does not work, of course. But Calvino's narrative of this doomed quest succeeds admirably, in part because he, like Samuel Beckett, recognizes the comic possibilities inherent in the tailspin of logic toward the absurd. Mr. Palomar's relentless speculations render him buffoonish. Passing a woman sunbathing topless on a beach, he averts his eyes lest she cover herself and embarrass them both. On reflection, though, he decides that his behavior was incorrect, since it reinforced outmoded taboos against nudity. So he walks by again, this time taking in the bare breasts as an incidental feature in the general landscape...
When he looks at the stars, frantically shuffling his charts, eyeglasses and flashlight, Mr. Palomar attracts a knot of wondering spectators. His behavior in a Paris cheese store, drawing sketches of various brands, makes other customers shake their heads. The dedicated observer has become a spectacle...
Calvino's spare narrative seems to cry out for allegorical explanations. Mr. Palomar could represent the travail of Western empiricism, in which every new discovery adds to the inexplicable. Or he might represent the last gasp of a class (European, intellectual, well-to-do) that is being smothered by the rise of the masses. None of the possible interpretations seems as interesting as the novel's deceptively plain but beguiling language. The wise reader of Mr. Palomar might best adopt a strategy that the hero formulates but fails to follow: "Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself...