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Difficult Loves & Marcovaldo
Delightful, provocative tales by "a master storyteller and... Italy's most brilliant living writer" (John Gardner, NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW) are brought together here in one volume for the first time.
Difficult Loves
Where love is concerned, the difficulties are always memorable: sometimes fleeting - a mute, erotic encounter on a train, the embarrassment of a thief who seeks refuge in a bedroom closet; sometimes ominous - the dilemma of a married couple working alternating shifts; sometimes seemingly insoluble - the quandaries that beset the photographer of beautiful women ...
These nine "adventures" and two longer tales - "Smog" and "A Plunge into Real Estate" - are famous in Europe for their almost miraculous balance between the real and the imaginary, the familiar and the fabulous.
Marcovaldo
From the master of fable and folktale comes an endearing new hero - reminiscent, in his wistful innocence and his unending misadventures, of Chaplin's "Little Tramp".
Marcovaldo is an unskilled labourer living in the grime of the city. Year after year, through stifling summers and frigid winters, he plods on - patient, resigned, melancholy. But while his feet read the dusty concrete, his mind seeks out the world of nature. He looks beyond the flashing neon to the moon and the Milky Way; in the gutters he sees mushroom and scarab beetles. His passion for nature not only protects him from the squalor of his life, but leads him into strange quests and encounters in a bizarre, dreamlike world that borders on Faerie.
Difficult Loves
Where love is concerned, the difficulties are always memorable: sometimes fleeting - a mute, erotic encounter on a train, the embarrassment of a thief who seeks refuge in a bedroom closet; sometimes ominous - the dilemma of a married couple working alternating shifts; sometimes seemingly insoluble - the quandaries that beset the photographer of beautiful women ...
These nine "adventures" and two longer tales - "Smog" and "A Plunge into Real Estate" - are famous in Europe for their almost miraculous balance between the real and the imaginary, the familiar and the fabulous.
Marcovaldo
From the master of fable and folktale comes an endearing new hero - reminiscent, in his wistful innocence and his unending misadventures, of Chaplin's "Little Tramp".
Marcovaldo is an unskilled labourer living in the grime of the city. Year after year, through stifling summers and frigid winters, he plods on - patient, resigned, melancholy. But while his feet read the dusty concrete, his mind seeks out the world of nature. He looks beyond the flashing neon to the moon and the Milky Way; in the gutters he sees mushroom and scarab beetles. His passion for nature not only protects him from the squalor of his life, but leads him into strange quests and encounters in a bizarre, dreamlike world that borders on Faerie.
- GenresFiction
374 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 1989
About the author
Italo Calvino
566 books9,220 followersItalo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979).
His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."
His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."
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