The Watcher and Other Stories (Harbrace Paperbound Library)

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In those years, Amerigo’s generation (or rather, that part of his generation that had lived in a certain way during the years after ’40) had discovered the resources of a previously unknown attitude: nostalgia. Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. The ending also rang false, mimicking the ending of Smog note for note despite it being a strange way to end the story in terms of tone. In Smog a young man moves to a large, dirty Italian city to become editor of “Purification,” a journal about air pollution.

Still, it feels gross, especially because Calvino ties the more unsavory themes into a secondary plot about a potential pregnancy.

You get a political aperitif of absurdity in the Watcher, a main dish of internal strife in the magnificent story of alienation in Smog and it all comes to a nice close with the short, sweet Argentine Ants bringing just the tiniest hints of class-discussion to a beautiful fable of family struggles. All pages of text are present, but they may include extensive notes and highlighting or be heavily stained. When a man, his wife, and their infant son move to Argentina they find that their house- and indeed, all the surrounding houses- are infested with ants. They even have the capacity to take on a life of their own as they pass among us acquiring stories, artifacts and scars along the way.

Personally, as a non-sub-human offense to creation, I love the shit out of Calvino and got everything I wanted out of this story.

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Of the three, Calvino is the funniest, the most variously and benignly curious about the human truth as it comes embedded in its animal, vegetable, historical, and cosmic contest. Front board has a 3/8 inch abrasion and a 1/8 inch light stain on edge of top board--both visible in last photo. is about a flirtation between a Thai teenager who keeps a pet pig named Clint Eastwood and an American girl who wanders around in a bikini. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. I could see myself rereading this because there was so much to unpack in "The Watcher" that just one reading doesn't seem to do it justice.

He washes his hands compulsively as he observes how the urbanites deal with a dirty fog that is intensifying its grip on the city. Italo Calvino's specialty was magical realism -- treeborne nobility, tarot stories, and noblemen chopped in half.