With his fantastical, fragmented fiction, Italo Calvino sought to reclaim the bond between intricate narrative forms and entertainment.
Calvino’s early fictions are romances of duality, set in worlds divided by forces of ritual and anarchy. The divisions are not subtle, but they are varied and delightful. Characters appear as doubles and opposites: Agilulf is shadowed by a passionate and unruly knight named Raimbaut. The tree-dwelling Baron’s quixotic life is narrated by a younger brother who remains firmly on the ground. The bisected Viscount is his own mirror image.
After “Our Ancestors,” Calvino began to move away from the tidy doublings of romance. His fiction no longer tilted at a fantasy of epic wholeness but at the broken and scattered feel of modern existence. “Literature has been fragmented ,” he observed in his essay “The Last Fires.” “It’s as if no one could any longer imagine an argument that would connect and contrast works, structures, tendencies, at the moment of invention, deriving a general meaning from the totality of individual creations.
A painful fear of misunderstanding emerges from these elusive fragments of stories, these elusive characters, and the highly artificial structures Calvino contrives to hold them together. That fear is offset in “Invisible Cities” and “The Castle of Crossed Destinies” by Calvino’s utopianism—his sincere belief in a time and a place in which the novel’s dream images of love and justice can be made real and shared, despite the anomie of mankind.
But the sheer loveliness and good humor of the vignettes transform each sliver of Mr. Palomar’s life into an expansive state of being. The rhythm of the waves, a flock of starlings, the blue veins in cheese, sunlight rippling on the sea—they hold a beauty and a mystery that Mr. Palomar contemplates with such intensity that he turns them into little universes of meaning unto themselves. The irony is that while we may see the infinite possibilities of his vision, Mr. Palomar himself cannot.
The opening chapters of the defective or incomplete novels alternate with chapters that describe the lonely inner life of you, the Reader, and your quest for both the book and someone to read it with. When you return to the store to exchange the first book, you encounter a woman named Ludmilla, also there returning a defective copy. You are hopelessly attracted to this woman, who becomes, in your imagination, the Other Reader. The Other Reader, however, comes with serious baggage.
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