What do you think?
Rate this book
Difficult Loves and Other Stories
A spectacular display of this key European writer's early work
This dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters and masterfully illustrates Calvino's unique perspective and narrative gifts. As well as the thirteen tales from his Difficult Loves collection this volume also includes 'Smog', 'A Plunge into Real Estate' and 'The Argentine Ant'.
This dazzling collection of stories follows the individual adventures of a varied cast of characters and masterfully illustrates Calvino's unique perspective and narrative gifts. As well as the thirteen tales from his Difficult Loves collection this volume also includes 'Smog', 'A Plunge into Real Estate' and 'The Argentine Ant'.
- GenresFiction
386 pages, Kindle Edition
About the author
Italo Calvino
573 books9,469 followersItalo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979).
His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."
His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 24, 2024
A woman loses her swimming suit and is stuck at sea. A amateur photographer wants to photograph "the many possibles and impossibles" portraits of his lover. A couple has the husband works the night shift and the wife works the day. A woman is worried that not finding her keys will get branded an adultress.
Difficult Loves contains 13 short stories (the "adventures") and 3 slightly larger novellas. As the name implies, the short stories (sometimes titled "stories of love and loneliness") are about banal, everyday situations which Calvino enhances and magnifies into everyday comedies and tragedies. The key theme here - as often in Calvino's stories - seems to be the magic and beauty of the common life of the common man.
The Adventure of a Married Couple is a particularily sweet story about the rituals and the simple love of a couple which works different shifts. The Adventure of a Motorist starts with a man who races to find his lover but ends up with a beautiful reflection on the meaning of love, of desire, and as ever, about the difficulty of communication between human beings. Yet it seems to always be that fear of misunderstanding, that part of unknown and unpredicability which we find in every other human being, that makes love worthwhile for Calvino.
Every day is an adventure. Every encounter has a million different thoughts and a million different questions and a million different possibilities because the Other is, in itself, an adventure. This is what I get from these stories. They are a deeply relaxing and a comforting read for me, putting into beautiful crafted proses and into comedy the every day struggle of life. And what poetry is there in our daily fights! Listen to this:
"I realise as I am speeding towards Y, what I most desire is not to find Y at the end of my drive: I want Y to be speeding towards me, this is the response I need; that is, I need her to know that I am speeding towards her but at the same time I need to know that she is speeding towards me."
Difficult loves, indeed.
The three novellas are much larger (between 50 and 100 pages each, as opposed to only 150 pages of adventures). They are sometimes called "Difficult life" and they depart from love and loneliness to depict in more detail everyday struggles with a touch of humor and fantasy. Calvino has this that you'll never really feel heavy reading him, but you will still feel some empathy and those light, beautiful feeling.
We start wtih an almost "Kafkaesque" story - The Argentine Ant. Like the other three novellas, it adds a bit of class and social perspective to the struggles of every day life. A couple decides to move to a new city for a new, better life... only to find the entire region infested to the brim with ants. There starts a quest to fight the invaders, or to maybe try to live with them. How does the rich landlord cope with this invasion? Can the love of the couple survive?
Smog has similar undertones but is a more social story. There's a lot of things going on there. A surprisingly early novel about pollution and the hypocrisy of the industrialists publishing articles on their technological solution while producing the very same smog that suffocates the town. Yet the story is more about this impossible "in-between" life of the protagonist, stuck between his absent, upper-class wife and his revolutionary friends, the sheer difficulty he has to relate to anyone, the ease and the somewhat pleasure he finds in his job which he recognises at the same time as entirely fruitless in a capitalistic society; should we mention that Calvino was a member of the communist resistance? I read Smog as a bit of a slice-of-life story, depicting the struggles and search for meaning of the post-war industrialist world.
And the final story of the collection - A Plunge into Real Eastate might be the most "on the nose" story about these silly, somewhat humorous, somewhat tragic everyday struggles. A man, burdened by taxes, decides to sell a plot of land he owns to develop new flats. What follows is an increasingly convoluted cascade of events, people coming in and out of deal, changing their minds. One reading can just be this entertaining comedy of errors of a man who keeps getting warned he's making a mistake and does it nonetheless. The other could be more metaphorical, as we can't help but feel a bit of sympathy for the real estate developer who, while obsviously scamming his clients, is merely reacting to the changing times.
Calvino is a bit of a comfort read, a nice little evasion on a summer beach in Italy, away from all the troubles of life, while at the same time having a beautiful and clear understanding of the everyday struggles inside the human mind. One of my favourite authors, and the "Adventures" are some of my favourite stories.
Difficult Loves contains 13 short stories (the "adventures") and 3 slightly larger novellas. As the name implies, the short stories (sometimes titled "stories of love and loneliness") are about banal, everyday situations which Calvino enhances and magnifies into everyday comedies and tragedies. The key theme here - as often in Calvino's stories - seems to be the magic and beauty of the common life of the common man.
The Adventure of a Married Couple is a particularily sweet story about the rituals and the simple love of a couple which works different shifts. The Adventure of a Motorist starts with a man who races to find his lover but ends up with a beautiful reflection on the meaning of love, of desire, and as ever, about the difficulty of communication between human beings. Yet it seems to always be that fear of misunderstanding, that part of unknown and unpredicability which we find in every other human being, that makes love worthwhile for Calvino.
Every day is an adventure. Every encounter has a million different thoughts and a million different questions and a million different possibilities because the Other is, in itself, an adventure. This is what I get from these stories. They are a deeply relaxing and a comforting read for me, putting into beautiful crafted proses and into comedy the every day struggle of life. And what poetry is there in our daily fights! Listen to this:
"I realise as I am speeding towards Y, what I most desire is not to find Y at the end of my drive: I want Y to be speeding towards me, this is the response I need; that is, I need her to know that I am speeding towards her but at the same time I need to know that she is speeding towards me."
Difficult loves, indeed.
The three novellas are much larger (between 50 and 100 pages each, as opposed to only 150 pages of adventures). They are sometimes called "Difficult life" and they depart from love and loneliness to depict in more detail everyday struggles with a touch of humor and fantasy. Calvino has this that you'll never really feel heavy reading him, but you will still feel some empathy and those light, beautiful feeling.
We start wtih an almost "Kafkaesque" story - The Argentine Ant. Like the other three novellas, it adds a bit of class and social perspective to the struggles of every day life. A couple decides to move to a new city for a new, better life... only to find the entire region infested to the brim with ants. There starts a quest to fight the invaders, or to maybe try to live with them. How does the rich landlord cope with this invasion? Can the love of the couple survive?
Smog has similar undertones but is a more social story. There's a lot of things going on there. A surprisingly early novel about pollution and the hypocrisy of the industrialists publishing articles on their technological solution while producing the very same smog that suffocates the town. Yet the story is more about this impossible "in-between" life of the protagonist, stuck between his absent, upper-class wife and his revolutionary friends, the sheer difficulty he has to relate to anyone, the ease and the somewhat pleasure he finds in his job which he recognises at the same time as entirely fruitless in a capitalistic society; should we mention that Calvino was a member of the communist resistance? I read Smog as a bit of a slice-of-life story, depicting the struggles and search for meaning of the post-war industrialist world.
And the final story of the collection - A Plunge into Real Eastate might be the most "on the nose" story about these silly, somewhat humorous, somewhat tragic everyday struggles. A man, burdened by taxes, decides to sell a plot of land he owns to develop new flats. What follows is an increasingly convoluted cascade of events, people coming in and out of deal, changing their minds. One reading can just be this entertaining comedy of errors of a man who keeps getting warned he's making a mistake and does it nonetheless. The other could be more metaphorical, as we can't help but feel a bit of sympathy for the real estate developer who, while obsviously scamming his clients, is merely reacting to the changing times.
Calvino is a bit of a comfort read, a nice little evasion on a summer beach in Italy, away from all the troubles of life, while at the same time having a beautiful and clear understanding of the everyday struggles inside the human mind. One of my favourite authors, and the "Adventures" are some of my favourite stories.
Displaying 1 of 1 review