“Every choice has an obverse, that is to say a renunciation,” the narrator of “The Castle of Crossed Destinies,” a shapeshifting late novel by Italo Calvino, observes. If this man is right—and he seems wise, if often visited by a strange turbulence—then we are constantly inflicting violence of a metaphysical nature. We go about our lives smothering possibilities and knifing alternatives, slashing at the fabric of reality itself. By trade, the narrator tells us, he is a fiction writer; he understands what it means to impose his will. One imagines him killing off subpar versions of his characters, littering the forks in his narrative with corpses. His off-kilter energy, which the novel itself shares—is it a shudder of reluctance, or a thrill of pleasure?
The Calvino of “Crossed Destinies” is a familiar one, the magical realist with a playful approach to the author-narrator-reader relationship. But the book also captures one of his spinier qualities: his aura of danger. He likes to pry things open, often in uncomfortable ways; “Crossed Destinies” throws together characters who can communicate only through tarot cards, and ends when the deck scatters, along with their identities. This is formal violence, the story flying apart like a tossed hand, but a bodily analogue is never far away: one man describes being dismembered, how “sharp blades . . . tore him to pieces.” And yet, because much of Calvino’s cruelty is abstracted, it seems free of malice, which makes it all the more magnetic. Even before they disintegrate, the characters in “Crossed Destinies” are subject to bizarre structural rigors: pulled from the forest, stripped of their voices, severed from their pasts. When brutality occurs at the level of form, flashing in every choice (or “renunciation”), it can surface how narrative is not just an act of creation but—for the unseen, unwritten alternative—a death sentence.
Death sentences arrive often in the title story of “Last Comes the Raven,” a new collection, in English, of Calvino’s early fiction. “Perhaps a man near death sees all the birds fly over,” the narrator broods, “and when he sees the raven it means that the hour has come.” Calvino’s own raven came in 1985. Since then, he has acquired the veneer of cultish allure that I associate with authors—David Foster Wallace, John Kennedy Toole, J. D. Salinger—who are frequently name-checked on Reddit. He is clever and protean, and his metafiction has a galaxy-brain swagger. (The novel “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler” begins ten times; its fragments are bound by a frame featuring You, the Reader, as well as an enchanting Other Reader named Ludmilla.) But Calvino’s work, which concerns the romance and frustration of the inexpressible, rarely feels gimmicky; it affords too much respect to the void.
This is especially true when he writes about the forest, one of his favorite settings. In “The Baron in the Trees,” from 1957, a nobleman vanishes into the overstory of the local woods so that his feet never have to touch the ground. Calvino often evokes the arbors of Shakespearean comedy, but he pushes their mischief to a chilling conclusion: in the forest, his protagonists encounter oblivion. Woods are where, for example, many of the characters in the “Last Comes the Raven” stories die, be they spies or thieves, lovers or children. Reading the collection, you can feel Calvino laying the groundwork for his mature novels, which transmute the real dangers of the forest into allegories about form. (“The forest is self-loss, mingling,” a knife-wielding goddess in “Crossed Destinies” declares. “You must lose yourself, tear away your attributes . . . be transformed into the undistinguished.”)
Calvino’s early biography, which plays a role in his mythos, may be relevant here. He grew up affluent on a working farm in San Remo, surrounded by the area’s thick woods and by the avocados and grapefruits that his father, an experimental agronomist, improbably grew. Calvino’s parents were exacting, emotionally reserved, and politically committed. After Germany invaded, in 1943, he joined the Italian Resistance; he fought for more than a year with the Garibaldi Brigade while the Nazis held his parents hostage. (They were later released.) When the war ended, Calvino settled in Turin, where he threw himself into the workers’ movement and began publishing short fiction. Giulio Einaudi, the influential publisher, smoothed Calvino’s introduction to members of the intellectual left, including Natalia Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese, who would become a close friend and mentor. As a novelist, Calvino initially practiced neorealism. In 1954, though, Einaudi gave him an assignment: gather folktales and fairy tales from across Italy, translate them from their native dialects, and convene them in a single volume. The Grimm-like project was an education in the building blocks of stories, in their uncanny, recombinatory power.
The chief value of “Last Comes the Raven,” which was published in Italian in 1947, may lie in its revelation of an author on the way to becoming himself. Calvino was drawn to narratives as pure and potent objects; in this collection, he examines but does not deconstruct them. There are eerie, irreducible vignettes with titles such as “A Judge Is Hanged” and “Theft in a Pastry Shop,” which recount exactly what they say they do. There is the author’s trademark ironic distance and careful wit, as well as tinges of surrealism. But, where the mature Calvino found a style that was supremely arch, alien, and spare, his more mimetic stories retain the funk of the human. They unfold in specific settings—different parts of Italy during and after the Second World War—and are animated by the politics of their historical moment. When an old man pulls a “beast” from the waves, a thing green with seaweed and past mortal understanding, it isn’t actually a beast, as connoisseurs of Calvino’s later work might expect. It is a mine.
The tales offer an unvarnished glimpse of Calvino’s material preoccupations. In “A Goatherd at Luncheon,” a well-to-do family invites a laborer inside for a meal and proceeds, as if powerless against the imperatives of class, to deride him. (In “Political Autobiography of a Young Man,” Calvino described his own discomfort with the sweaty farm workers whom his parents entertained in their study.) Most of the stories touch on the struggle between Mussolini’s Black Shirts and the Communist opposition; Fascist deaths are related with relish, whereas a terrible empathy infuses the panicked interior monologue of a boy bearing a letter across a pass riddled with explosive devices. Reading the collection, I thought of a scene in “Invisible Cities,” from 1972, in which the explorer Marco Polo, halfway through his marvellous travelogue, is asked to recall his home town. “Every time I describe a city I am saying something about Venice,” he replies. These stories feel like Calvino’s Venice. Their themes—the fluidity of identity (as in “The Bagnasco Brothers,” in which two men become unrecognizable when they leave their village) and the narcotizing dream of wealth—would continue to haunt him, but never again would they seem so directly sourced from life. In a sketch called “Lazy Sons,” for example, the adult characters, who live with their parents, spend the day drowsing and ruminating. Their spiritual numbness would, in a typical Calvino story, read as an existential symptom, the cost of seeking meaning in a meaningless world—but, here on the family farm, the cause is more prosaic, and more acute. “Everything is drying up,” the narrator confesses, “and there’s no money or manpower to keep it running.”
It’s hard to know what to make of a Calvino who writes on this human scale, whose sorcerer’s tower has been downsized and filled with humbler, more lived-in furniture. Instead of awe, the reader of “Last Comes the Raven” registers a bloom of social feelings: sympathy, recognition, curiosity. When a character is cruel, she possesses a motivation. When she suffers, historical circumstances can help illuminate her pain. The book’s particular milieu—neighborhoods that have been scarred by the Italian civil war of the mid-twentieth century—may already be familiar to many American readers, thanks to the Neapolitan quartet, a series of blockbuster novels by the writer Elena Ferrante. (Ferrante’s translator, Ann Goldstein, is one of five to render these Calvino stories into English.) “My Brilliant Friend,” the first of the novels, was striking for how it mapped changes in its young characters’ thinking: Lenù, the narrator, initially understands her world as a child might, via ogres and enchanted shoes; only later does she connect the violence she senses with her city’s political past. Calvino’s work moves in the opposite direction, away from temporal or geographical coördinates and toward the elemental gloom of fairy tales. Was he flinching from trauma, one wonders, or sublimating it? Then again, why choose?
