Tuesday, May 15, 2012

Surely this would not be a problem if I could read Italian

I found on Golden Rule Jones a link to an entertaining audio tribute to Italo Calvino, recorded during an event organized by Calvino's daughter in 1999. The tribute consists of actors--man, I love Wallace Shawn's voice--reading brief excerpts from a variety of Calvino's writings. There are also appearances by Salman Rushdie, Carlos Fuentes, and Umberto Eco, who each read an essay on the Italian fabulist and critic. My first foray into Calvino's writing was the, well . . . let's call it a short novella, The Watcher, which failed to grab me. But hearing the readings and, in particular, the essay by Umberto Eco (he should stick to criticism) entitled “On 'The Baron in the Trees' and the Role of the Intellectual,” my curiosity was reignited.

Around the same time, I remember hearing Aimee Bender suggest in the Powell’s Bookcast that the neophyte reader of Calvino might begin with Cosmicomics or, perhaps, Invisible Cities. Then one day at Powell's (the eponymous original, on 57th street in Chicago), I came across a spanking new copy of If on a winter’s night a traveler and stole it for five bucks (Oh how I love that store). I liked the novel so well that I bought three more books by Calvino: Cosmicomics, The Baron in the Trees, and Invisible Cities. I just finished Invisible Cities and I’m glad I didn’t read it first.

The novel is a series of short, dream-like vignettes that describe a panoply of fantastic cities. The vignettes feel mostly distinct, though there is a narrative thread that holds them together: the storyteller is Marco Polo, and he is describing cities he has visited to the emperor Kublai Khan.

It is a short book, but it was a slugfest. I’m pretty sure Calvino won, though by the end, I was tired and uninterested in fighting any longer. There were fire storms of insight throughout and the high pitch of intellectual literary play kept me reading, but I was unable, perhaps, to maintain the concentration necessary to really enjoy the novel much. Because the vignettes are so short--about a page a piece--and the worlds described so fantastic, I had trouble investing in many of the sections until I’d nearly finished reading each one.

Maybe I’ve grown too comfortable with the long narrative arcs of relationships and suspense that undergird most novels, but I didn’t feel the brief, detached interactions between M. Polo and The Great Khan did enough work to support the telling of so many similar allegorical tales. In their short hallucinatory dialogues, The Great Khan and Polo are most like amoral gods presiding over the city-worlds Marco is depicting. They have interesting existential conversations and discussions on the art of storytelling . . . but it isn't enough. I didn't feel like the Polo/Khan frame was necessary except to marshal the vignettes into the type of symmetrical formal structure that organizes both If on a winter's night a traveler and Invisible Cities. In the former, however, the deliberate arrangement of the book is transparent--its parts visible and it moves boldly like a well-oiled literary machine. But in Invisible Cities, the formal rigor felt forced--its groups of stories arranged into nine mystical rings, their relationships determined by mythical links more complicatedly designed.

I’m going to reread it for sure, though, if for no other reason than the last paragraph:

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.”

When I eventually plowed through the final page of Invisible Cities and put the book down, I experienced the same nagging dissatisfaction that I had when I first read As I Laying Dying. As with the Faulkner, I felt it took me too long to understand the angles from which Calvino was visualizing his imaginary world. Upon rereading As I Lay Dying it became one of my favorite and most admired books. I don’t know if that will happen with Invisible Cities, but I’m definitely going to read Cosmicomics and The Baron in the Trees before I decide to re-engage this precocious little beast.


Friday, July 16, 2010

2 New Stories in Print

Hello all,

Apologies for the mass mailing and to anyone who gets this twice.  Just wanted to let you know that you can read my new story in the debut issue TriQuarterly Online.  Just go to http://triquarterly.org/ and scroll down.  You'll also find new work by my friend Achy Obejas.  Check it out!

But wait!  There's more . . .

I have another story out in the 2010 MR Prize issue of Mississippi Review.  You can order a copy at https://shop.usm.edu/ustores/web/product_detail.jsp?PRODUCTID=348.

Thanks everyone!

Best,

David Driscoll

Thursday, April 03, 2008

Here it is

So much more remote.  Gaining momentum here.