The Path to the Spiders' Nests

Rating:
Summary: Picaresque, prescient, pithy
Review: 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:
Summary: Calvino at his most accessible
Review: Calvino's first novel is loosely based on his experiences as a young partisan during WWII. The overriding purpose seems to be to explode the myth behind the all-too-human countrymen who fought in the resistance. Rather than glamorize them as heroes, as had been done in countless books and tales of the period, Calvino takes great pains to show just how foolish, short-sighted and pathetic many of these men really were. Even harsher is his portrayal of the windbags in the barroom, who are quick to egg others on to action, but prove unwilling to take any such risks themselves. Of course he saves what is perhaps the very harshest criticism for his fictional sister - who is literally in bed with the enemy - and himself - in the person of the lonely street urchin Pin, who like the sister, is desperate to fit in anywhere with anyone at any price.

While this all may sound rather heavy and depressing, the viewpoint of the young lad gives it all a fresh and essentially non-judgmental veneer. Think of "The Wonder Years", only focusing on a homeless boy growing up under fascist rule. The characters are skillfully sketched, although hardly people one would care to know, and while the plot is not overburdened with action for a war novel, things move along a fair pace.

Calvino is best known for his technical fireworks, and while there are one or two spots where we see him developing these skills, for the most part the story is told in a very straightforward, chronological fashion. So Calvino's fans, who likely start each of his novels expecting a book unlike any they've ever read, may be disappointed at how pedestrian an approach the master takes to telling this story. On the other hand, readers who find Calvino's novels "too bizarre" may find this one surprisingly palatable, or at least comprehensible.

Rating:
Summary: Nice First Try
Review: Experimental, historical, cynical, considerably meditative, innocently gloomy, and yet, as the author indicated, exaggerated, distorted.

It is a hightly sophisticated first try, but as most first novels do, its narrative style lacks the harmony and refinement that the author has worked on in his later career.

Rating:
Summary: while the city is still visible
Review: 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.

Rating:
Summary: at the margins of the resistance: funny, sad, chaotic
Review: 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:
Summary: at the margins of the resistance: funny, sad, chaotic
Review: 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.