Calvino is often exalted by the postmodern literary crowd for his novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. Indeed, that was my first experience with him, and at first I wasn't all that thrilled by him. I had to read the postmodern gem during the summer preceding my freshman year at college, for an experience known only by other Lawrence University survivors: Freshman Studies. But, I shall not regale you with the stories from my Alma mater. (Nourishing, indeed.) "If on a winter's night...," or "That book," as most of us now refer to it, wasn't really as bad as we all make it out to be. But really, what else did they expect us, freshly graduated high school students eager to "shake loose" during our last summer as adolescents, to make of it? (The blurb on the back of the book reads: "If on a winter's night a traveler turns out not to be one novel but ten, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together, they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another. They are the true heroes of the novel, for what would writing be without readers?" I think you see my point.)
To be honest, I don't remember why I thought to pick up another of his books. Or even why I decided to discover that he had written other books. But I did. And that book was Difficult Loves. And I was hooked.
My love for Calvino is nearly indescribable. I love him for the way he makes me feel when I read, the experience I have absorbing every line. He is not really a postmodern literary author. I mean, he is. (Was.) But he is far more than that: he is magic realism. He is Borges unrestricted. He explores the magic of childhood, stretching reality only the way children can. Or love can by lovers. He explores the endless stream of the universe and time through a character that defies our definitions of life and form. He maps every city imaginable. It is from his novel Invisible Cities, a stream of meditations and dialogues on cities, memories, inhabitants, form, and absence, from which I have selected my passage for you:
Whether Armilla is like this because it is unfinished or because it has been demolished, whether the cause is some enchantment or only a whim, I do not know. The fact remains that it has no walls, no ceilings, no floors: it has nothing that makes it seem a city, except the water pipes that rise vertically where the houses should be and spread out horizontally where the floors should be: a forest of pipes that end in taps, showers, spouts, overflows. Against the sky a lavabo's white stands out, or a bathtub, or some other porcelain, like late fruit still hanging from the boughs. You would think the plumbers had finished their job and gone away before the bricklayers arrived: or else their hydraulic systems, indestructible, had survived a catastrophe, an earthquake, or the corrosion of termites.
Abandoned before or after it was inhabited, Armilla cannot be called deserted. At any hour, raising your eyes among the pipes, you are likely to glimpse a young woman, or many young women, slender, not tall of stature, luxuriating in the bathtubs or arching their backs under the showers suspended in the void, washing or drying or perfuming themselves, or combing their long hair at a mirror. In the sun, the threads of water fanning from the showers glisten, the jets of the taps, the spurts, the splashes, the sponges' suds.
I have come to this explanation: the streams of water channeled in the pipes of Armilla have remained in the possession of nymphs and naiads. Accustomed to traveling along underground veins, they found it easy to enter into the new aquatic realm, to burst from multiple fountains, to find new mirrors, new games, new ways of enjoying the water. Their invasion may have driven out the human beings, or Armilla may have been built by humans as a votive offering to win the favor of the nymphs, offended at the misuse of the waters. In any case, now they seem content, these maidens: in the morning you hear them singing. (Calvino, Italo. Invisible Cities, 49-50.)
And to answer your unspoken question, no, I have not yet reread That book. (Yet.)
