Difficult loves

Difficult Loves is a collection of early works by Italo Calvino.  Already many of his later pre-occupations can be seen.  In the eponymous stories, we have a series of eleven short tales, bound together by a common thread, yet looking at the same world from different angles.  This was to come to full fruition in Calvino's Invisible Cities, an amazing refraction and re- creation of Venice through a series of similarly different but related stories.

In all of the Difficult Loves, there is a an attention to telling minutiae which immediately stamps the works as Calvino's.  This is not some preoccupation with trivia, but is born out of a close observation of the texture of life.  For example the Adventure of a traveller turns into an almost Proustian savouring of the separate and varying sensations of travelling in a train at night.  There is also an organic logic which leads us beguilingly through the twists and turns of the narrative.  A constantly questioning and inquisitive mind is at play: does this mean this or that?  What were the real motives?  Has this any significance in the larger scheme of things?  In this way the narrow focus of these apparently slight tales is widened until their ramifications seem to spread out to everything. 

Of course, in this respect the initial choice of Difficult Loves as the framework aids the author greatly.  We are dealing with grey situations, cases where there may or may not be a resolution.  The format of eleven stories allows Calvino to encompass all classes and concerns.  Their short span means that no resolution is expected or given.  They are open-ended, the beginning rather than the end.

The longest of them, and perhaps the best and most profound, is the Adventure of a reader. How, you might well ask, can someone whose main characteristic is reading, have an adventure?  But he does, as one slides up to him like the sea beside which he is trying to read.  The fact that a beautiful woman seems intent on seducing him becomes an increasingly tiresome distraction as he gets into his book.  Although we see everything through his riveted eyes, Calvino maps out an impatient world beyond mere books, one that will keep on insinuating itself.  As they begin to make love, the main concern of the reader is that he should not lose his place.

Each of these stories inhabits its own little world which is clearly part of a larger, fuller one.  Each is written in a beautifully economical prose which never intrudes. Each is a gem. 

The other two stories in the volume are rather longer, and less satisfactory.  Smog is a curiously obsessive piece about pollution, both environmental and moral.  As an anti-city polemic it is weakened by its oblique approach.  As a first person narration, it fails to grip.  Similarly, A plunge into real estate begins as a homely story of people getting out of their depth as they try and work with a flash harry property speculator.  But gradually, we realise that this story too has a strong moral overtone, and is all deeply symbolic about La Bella Italia being sold off.  We can be grateful Calvino did not pursue this avenue.

(29.3.86)

Index