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*Calvino. Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. 1979. 263 pp.

I finally got through this in the original. My reading of Bolaño and Coolidge kept me from it for a while. It seems very much of its time, with reader-response criticism sweeping through American universities at around the same time.

If you haven't read it I suggest you do. (In whatever language you want.) It is really the compleat treatise on the act of reading in relation to every kind of social institution that impacts on it. Publication, translation, scholarship, literary theory, censorship, politics.

On this reading I enjoyed the 10 first chapters of novels more than the in-between chapter that Calvino uses to get from one to the next. That interstitial material seemed too cute in some ways.

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*Calvino. Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. 1947. 195 pp.

This is Calvino's first novel, set in WWIII. A boy, Pin, has a sister who is a prostitute. A German sailor, a client of the sister, has a pistol. The local men at the bar tell Pin to steal it, but when he does, they don't seem that interested any more. He hides it in the place where spiders build their nests (hence the title of the novel.) The German's arrest him and beat him; he escapes from jail along with a resistance leader, Lupo Rosso (the red wolf) and makes his way to an encampment of partisans in the mountains, along with "Cugino" (the cousin). He is basically a "bambino" in the world of "grandi." He doesn't really understand the adult world, but has no childhood to speak of. I couldn't really get a fix on his exact age, but took him to be 12 or so.

There's also an interesting preface written by Calvino in 1967, 20 years after the initial publication of the novel.

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Italo Calvino. La speculazione edilizia.. 1963. 138 pp.

I'm almost halfway through this. The title means "real-estate speculation," I guess. Quinto, an inhabitant of the Italian Riviera, is deciding whether to sell part of the family estate to an untrustworthy developer, Caisotti. He goes around talking to people who tell him Caisotti is not to be trusted. There's some dreary social commentary along the way. Eventually, Quinto (the fifth man?) devises a plan to sell to Caisotti but also develop part of his own land himself. Quinto is a communist or ex-communist, with some intellectual friends who want to start a Marxist journal--a poet and a philosopher. Some dreary banter about Marx and Freud ensues.

There is no hint here of the author of Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and Castle of the Forked Destinies. (This must be another novelist named "Italo Calvino." ) I sure hope this gets interesting before too long, because so far it's on the duller side. The central conflict of the novel seems to be that developing between Quinto and Caisotti: who will get the best end of the dreary real-estate deal? Maybe a few corpses showing up, Sciascia-style, will enliven the book a bit. I did learn some new words: "battuta" means a joke or witticism.

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Antonio Tabucchi. Notturno indiano 1984. 109 pp.

A man goes to India to search for his missing friend, Xavier. He follows various clues, going to different places and having a variety of conversations with people. Not much happens, really. I think I'll give up on Tabucchi for a while. Sostiene Peirera was good, but the last two I read were kind of inconsequential. In fact, this one reproduces the structure of the "edge of the horizon." A pointless search that comes to nothing.