In ‘From the terrace’, Mr Palomar looks at his city from the viewpoint of the pigeons, who see only elements of the upper layer, a lovingly imagined list of which Calvino provides over almost a full page (Calvino loved lists). This is a book too which challenges understandings of what is important. Ignorance is bliss, if only he could see it. Really, it is a book that you need to read twice.) He watches the daytime moon, “porous as a sponge”, solidify as night falls into a “lake of shininess … brimming in the darkness with a halo of cold silver.” As he considers the world around him, questioning everything he sees, he reflects that “perhaps it is this same distrust of our senses that prevents us from feeling comfortable in the universe.” He extends his discomfiture to mankind generally: to think as he does is to bring on unsettling uncertainties. He feels he “ must go and look at the stars … because he hates waste and believes it is wrong to waste the great quantity of stars that is put at his disposal.” Looking down as well as up, he contemplates his lawn: “the lawn’s purpose is to represent nature, and this representation occurs as the substitution of the nature proper to the area with a nature in itself natural but artificial for this area.” (Yes, there are many sentences in Mr Palomar that you need to read twice. Rather than enjoy it, he feels guilty when he cannot identify the bird a song belongs to.
But he looks so hard that sometimes he cannot see what matters.
Inner awareness is what Mr Palomar wants, and he hopes to achieve it by increased consciousness of his surroundings. Eventually Mr Palomar has walked past her so often that the woman covers herself up and makes off, “as if she were avoiding the tiresome insistence of a satyr.” Elsewhere, Mr Palomar observes two tortoises mating, and wonders if their lack of sensory stimuli might “drive them to a concentrated, intense mental life, lead them to a crystalline inner awareness”? However, he realises that “my not looking presupposes that I am thinking of the nakedness, worrying about it and this is basically an indiscreet and reactionary attitude.” He passes her again, worries more and tries in different ways to avoid looking, and to avoid avoiding looking. (Suddenly Nicholson Baker’s The Mezzanine, published five years later, doesn’t seem so novel.) Calvino’s comic lightness of touch is evident early on, from ‘The naked bosom’, where Mr Palomar is at pains to avoid looking at a young woman’s breasts as he walks along the beach. This is a book of attention to everything. The best way of defining this book – beautiful, perfect, unique, challenging – for the wary browser would be to categorise it on the back cover as Fiction/Philosophy. The character of Mr Palomar is crucial, yet sometimes seems little more than an observer from to which to hang the observations made in the piece. What to call these pieces: stories? Vignettes? Essays? Meditations, even? They do not really have storylines, but they do move forward, or outward, from the initial moment.
#Mr palomar italo calvino series#
It is a series of short pieces – twenty-seven in 111 pages – describing moments in the life of the title character. From that you might assume that this innovative author, forever progressing and never writing the same book twice, was at the apogee of his ingenuity. William Weaver 1985) was the last book Calvino published in his lifetime.
Then there is this book, which I recently remembered I didn’t finish first time around. I think it is safe to say that none of these will overturn the major works – If on a winter’s night a traveller, Invisible Cities, Cosmicomics, Marcovaldo, and so on. Calvino in fact has continued to publish new work regularly since his death in 1985, from the bran tub of unpublished and uncollected writings his relatives keep dipping into. Italo Calvino is one of those authors – like Graham Greene – whose works I devoured in my early twenties, and haven’t read much since.
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