Katie's review
Difficult Loves
by Italo Calvino
Katie's review
Difficult Loves by Italo Calvino
Katie's review
rating:
recommended for: Vicki, among others
Two or three stars for the first three quarters of this collection, a dazzling five to the final installment--the eight "Stories of Love and Loneliness."
A typically rending, 159-word final sentence:
"And on the doorsteps of all those houses were numerous women, elderly or aged, and on the parapets, seated in a row, numerous men, old and young, all in white shirts; in the middle of those streets like stairways, the babies were playing on the ground and an older boy was lying across the path, his cheek against the step, sleeping there because it was a bit cooler and less smelly than inside the house; and everywhere, lighting or circling, were clouds of flies, and on every wall and every festoon of newspaper around the fireplaces was the infinite spatter of fly excrement; and into Usnelli's mind came words and words, thick, woven one into another, with no space between the lines, until little by little they could no longer be distinguished; it was a tangle from which...more
A typically rending, 159-word final sentence:
"And on the doorsteps of all those houses were numerous women, elderly or aged, and on the parapets, seated in a row, numerous men, old and young, all in white shirts; in the middle of those streets like stairways, the babies were playing on the ground and an older boy was lying across the path, his cheek against the step, sleeping there because it was a bit cooler and less smelly than inside the house; and everywhere, lighting or circling, were clouds of flies, and on every wall and every festoon of newspaper around the fireplaces was the infinite spatter of fly excrement; and into Usnelli's mind came words and words, thick, woven one into another, with no space between the lines, until little by little they could no longer be distinguished; it was a tangle from which...more
