Word: palomares
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...Palomar is near-sighted...
Calvino takes for his instrument a highly unliterary device: that great observation post of modern technological man, the gigantic telescope on Mount Palomar in Southern California. He perches a pair of unsteady eyeglasses on the balding crown of the observatory. The critical mass of our atomic age is passe; we have moved on to critical distance in the what-comes-next age. Middle-aged Mr. Palomar is the clumsy seer. Mr. Calvino is the critic, shooting from the hip the question for scientific man in his midlife crisis--"'What color is your parachute?'...or haven...
...Palomar is puppet voyeur of the earthly, the bizarre, the cosmic. Frustrated by the naked breast of a sunbathing woman who misreads his truly beachcombing intentions, confused in his reading of the heavens against a cardboard constellation chart, he shuns both celestial bodies and tanned ones, for the "certainty" in the refraction index of his own clumsy corrective lenses. Like a misplaced, compulsive Descartes, checking the stars to make sure nothing has changed, Mr. Palomar makes rules for himself: he must stick to what he sees...
...IDEA OF order for Mr. Palomar parodies the ancient trick of looking for guidance in the zodiac...
Instead of precise instruments and control dials guiding man's ordered observations, Mr. Palomar performs an awkward ritual, blinding himself with his flashlight and fumbling with charts of the heavens. This image is itself the only stable reference point for the Reader, the riveted audience of Calvino's quest. Unbeknownst to Mr. Palomar absorbed in his charts, a little crowd of onlookers gathers, whispering and observing "his movements like the convulsions of a madman." Unbeknownst to the Reader absorbed in the book, Calvino has manipulated him out into the open, where he can observe his Reader, placed among Mr. Palomar...