Italo Calvino’s autobiographical notes collected to good effect

HERMIT IN PARIS: AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL WRITINGS

By Italo Calvino

Translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin

Pantheon, $23, 255 pages

REVIEWED BY REX ROBERTS

As his wife notes in her preface to “Hermit in Paris,” a collection of 14 autobiographical pieces by the

late Italo Calvino, the volume will be of most interest to the author’s fans. The memoirs, reflections and interviews assembled here for the first time in English are reprints from Italian editions, with the exception of “American Diary 1959?1960,” never before published, and the title essay, which appeared as a limited edition in Switzerland. Fortunately, these two writings are the best in the book, although Calvino’s journal of his six-month tour of the United States, courtesy of the Ford Foundation, is sketchy, and his hesitant celebration of Paris, his adopted city, is scant.

The majority of “Hermit in Paris” recounts Calvino’s political awakening and subsequent disillusionment — his involvement in the Italian resistance during World War II, his embrace of the Communist Party, and his quarrel with the Stalinists — as well as his development as a writer. He talks a good deal about his childhood in San Remo, his decision to move to Turin, and his relationships with colleagues and mentors (in particular, with Cesare Pavese, Elio Vittorini and Guilio Einaudi, men of letters in Italy during the mid-20th century).

Calvino also addresses his preference for fable over realistic fiction and comments candidly on his own work, as in the following passage, a nice example of Calvino’s charming, self-effacing manner:

“I would very much like to be one of those writers who have something really clear in their head to say and throughout their life they promote this idea in their works. I would like to be like that, but I am not; my relationship with ideas is more complex and problematical; I always think of the pros and cons in everything and each time I have to construct a very complex picture. This is the reason why I can even go many years without publishing anything, working on projects which constantly end up in crisis.”

Calvino was born in 1923 in Cuba, where his father, an agronomist, and his mother, a botanist, were working at an experimental agricultural institute.

“My birth overseas now boils down to an unusual detail on official forms,” notes Calvino, “a bundle of family memories, and a first name which was inspired by the pietas of emigres towards their own household gods, but which back in their homeland sounded brazen and pompously patriotic.” His parents wanted him to pursue science, as did his brother, a future geologist, but Calvino preferred the world of words, captivated by the dialects still spoken in the Italian Riviera and Alps.

If he rejected his parents’ vocation, he embraced their liberal politics, a choice made easier and more difficult by Benito Mussolini’s Fascism. When war broke out, Calvino fought the Germans in the Ligurian mountains as a member of the Garibaldi Brigades, an experience he turned into a novel, “The Path to the Nest of Spiders,” published in 1947.

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