The Watcher and Other Stories (Harbrace Paperbound Library)

Product Information

Images Donate icon An illustration of a heart shape Donate Ellipses icon An illustration of text ellipses. With this caveat in mind, I think this would be a good introduction to Calvino’s general style and interests. If you're Italian and came of age after WWII you might like it; and "The Argentine Ant" I haven't got to. Books are unique in their ability to encompass lives, from the lives of their authors, to the characters or subjects they portray.

He seemed to be working towards literary styles that were suited to urban and rustic life (and its socio-political implications). For his part, Amerigo had learned that change, in politics, conies through long and complex processes, and you couldn’t hope for change overnight, as if it were a stroke of luck; for him, as for so many others, acquiring experience had meant becoming slightly pessimistic.But Calvino's rich, slightly dreamlike writing style is very much intact here, and the more optimistic tone can be found in the socialite, who sees beauty where her boyfriend sees only squalor. The main character is assigned to a voting precinct in a giant Church-run urban institution that is a combination of convent, school, sanitarium and psychiatric asylum. It turns out the owner of the magazine also owns one of the largest factories in town, so is a big cause of pollution.

The neighbors show us some of the strategies people adapt to defeat their daily worries, but the truth is you'll never be able to do away with such worries entirely. Calvino's third tale, “The Ar gentine Ant,” is the earliest of the group, and it is more ex plicitly allegorical and more pessimistic.We use only premium packaging materials and every attempt is made to be as accurate as possible in our listings. To preserve these articles as they originally appeared, The Times does not alter, edit or update them. The "Argentine Ant" is the story of a young couple with a small child that move to a small town where there appears to be an unending bounty of ants that invade everything everywhere, but the townspeople insist there are no ants. I enjoyed the conversational sections more, though some of it is pretty unintelligible and consists mainly of complicated observations relating to political theory.

Further, the writing is generally strong, and as a Calvino fan it’s interesting to see him start to dabble with more scientific concepts and situations, almost like this is a precursor to his Cosmicomics. Additional services offered include appraisals for Bay Area residents and collection development for private individuals and institutions. There are places of temporary respite, like the beach, but the problems will be waiting for you when you come back. This is to say nothing of Calvino's works that are brilliant throughout, foremost among them Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. It's only 75 pages long, so by the time I'd got used to Calvino's style and his perspective, the story was half over.

And in "The Argentine Ant," the citizens of a provincial seaside town struggle against a government-controlled infestation. I bought this book on the recommendation of Ian McEwan, who discussed 'The Watcher' on the LRB 'Past, Present, Future' podcast. The main characters vary a lot -- Amerigo is naively Communistic, and rather irresponsible, while the "Smog" guy is rather stagnant (and clearly has OCD as well). In fact, ever since the vote had become obligatory in the period following the Second World War, hospitals, asylums, and convents had served as great reservoirs of votes for the Christian Democrat party, and at Cottolengo, above all, at each election instances were discovered of idiots being led to vote, or dying old women, or men paralyzed with arteriosclerosis, in any case, people unable to make logical distinctions. There's so much interesting thought and writing in "The Watcher," but it was really hard for me to read the way the narrator thought about the disabled folks around him as sub-human.