March 6, 2023 Issue

Merve Emre, in her absorbing “Marvellous Things,” in this week’s issue, extols the work of Italo Calvino. She calls him “the most charming writer to put pen to paper in the twentieth century.” That may be so. I’ve tried reading him, but never got very far. He’s too dreamy, too schematic for my taste. He’s a fabulist; I’m a realist. But there’s no doubt he could write. In his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), he provides this description:

The old towns on the Ligurian coast grew up in times when those parts were infested by Moorish pirates; built to resist siege, they are as close and dense as pine-cones; their deep narrow alleys, called carrugi, are spanned by arches propping the tops of the houses, with dark vaulted arcades and flights of cobbled steps running far below …

That “they are as close and dense as pine-cones” is inspired! 

Emre’s comments on Calvino’s Mr. Palomar (1985) are compelling. She says of the book’s concluding vignette:

In the final vignette, “Learning to be dead,” Mr. Palomar tries to imagine the most obscure thing: the world after his death:

“If time has to end, it can be described, instant by instant,” Mr. Palomar thinks, “and each instant, when described, expands so that its end can no longer be seen.” He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.

It is a terribly funny and terribly bleak ending. Yet even here one finds a flicker of hope. If each of the twenty-seven vignettes is an instant in his life, and if each instant, when described, expands forever, then at the moment Mr. Palomar dies he lives. And if he lives forever we need never reconcile ourselves to a world without him in it.

Emre calls Mr. Palomar “Calvino’s most affecting work.” Her review spurs me to give him another try.