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Title: The Path to the Spiders' Nests : Revised Edition by Italo Calvino ISBN: 0-06-095658-5 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 30 May, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 4.25 (4 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: at the margins of the resistance: funny, sad, chaotic
Comment: This is an absolutely wonderful novel about a boy who wanders into the Italian resistance during WWII. There, he finds a hilarious panoplie of characters, from lice-infested peasant marxists to the hyper-intellectual young co-leader. Each person is rendered so vividly - and if you have ever lived in Italy you recognise the types - that the novel is extremely dense and pleasureful.
The plot is fairly simple: a young boy from a chaotic household has to flee after being arrested for stealing a pistol from his sister's German "client." (He was trying to impress the ineffectual drunks in his usual hangout, a smoky and dilapidated bar, and then gets caught up in the resistance.) All the time, he is lonely and desperately seeking a special companion, someone to love and take care of him. It is not a heroic tale, but one about what it was really like in the resistance: more about the pauses and boredom, the bad food and promiscuity, the strange thoughts by men risking their lives for murky as well as clear-cut causes - the socialist revolution or to rid their countryside of the Germans who steal their cows. This is a new and fascinating view, told with great wit and style. This is the first novel I read in Italian, and its vocabulary is difficult but wonderfully succinct and clear.
Warmly recommended.
Rating: 5
Summary: Picaresque, prescient, pithy
Comment: A fascinating tale of compassion and dispair in the postwar picaresque tradition of writers like Gunther Grass.
Told from the perspective of the boy, Pin, Calvino's vision is fresh and imaginative. The tale invites us to understand the resistance movement as one not only of bravery, but of anxious restlessness and chaos. Through the commander Kim, we see war--on either side--as the defense of the humiliated against their aggressors. No one is spared. In this, we see a bit of ourselves and the current political arena in Washington and Iraq.
Rating: 4
Summary: while the city is still visible
Comment: I looked for this book for years after reading about it in a Gore Vidal essay I believe. Finally I noticed it was in print again and so I at last read it. This may not be Calvino's best to Calvino fans but to those of us who aren't particular fans of the Calvino style this is his first book and so the style isn't altogether there yet. To me that is a good thing. As artists become masters of their craft they begin to control their material to such an extent that nothing is left to chance. The charm of this book is that Calvino is not in complete command and so the book has a kind of raw innocence very suitable to its subject matter(WWII Italy) and lead character(a child). This is a very earthy book and that word does not apply to later Calvino. All the stuff is here that will later appear in more perfect form, but for this material he is in just the right form.
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Title: The Garden of Finzi-Continis by Giorgio Bassani, William Weaver ISBN: 0156345706 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: October, 1996 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: A Woman by Sibilla Aleramo, Rosalind Delmar, Richard Drake ISBN: 0520049497 Publisher: University of California Press Pub. Date: June, 1983 List Price(USD): $17.95 |
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Title: The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino, Archibald Colquhoun ISBN: 0156106809 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: March, 1977 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Sea of Memory: A Novel by Erri De Luca, Beth Brombert, Enrico de Luca, Beth A. Brombert ISBN: 0880016787 Publisher: Ecco Pub. Date: 01 August, 1999 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: Confessions of Zeno by Italo Svevo ISBN: 0679722343 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 18 June, 1989 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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