الطريق إلى سان جيوفاني

by Italo Calvino, إيتالو كالفينو, أمل منصور (Translator)

«Mi è sempre stato difficile raccontare in prima persona i miei ricordi di guerra partigiana. Potrei farlo secondo varie chiavi narrative tutte egualmente veritiere: dal rievocare la commozione degli affetti in gioco, dei rischi, delle ansie, delle decisioni, delle morti, al puntare invece sulla narrazione eroicomica delle incertezze, degli errori, dei disguidi, delle disavventure in cui incappava un giovane borghese, impreparato politicamente, privo d’ogni esperienza di vita, vissuto in famiglia fino allora.» Italo Calvino

Genres: Nonfiction, Essays, Memoir, Italy, Italian Literature, Literature, Short Stories

109 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Italo 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."

Reviews

[Gaurav Sagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Road to San Giovanni

'The Road to San Giovanni' is a collection of five autobiographical essays- though it would be appropriate to call them 'memory deliberations' instead- which presents an affecting self-portrait and offers indirect insights into how Calvino conjured up his imaginary worlds- worlds which are surreal, mystical but so enthralling that they look real- whose language combines exactitude, freedom and lightness to form different voice altogether.



Calvino starts with his relationship- which was not usual as his father was curious about the minute examination of flora, he had passion for studying and acclimatizing exotic plants, while Calvino used to weave his own world of fantasy-with father.

"The way my father saw things, it was from here up that the world began, while the other part of the world below the house was a mere appendix, necessary sometimes when there were things to be, but alien and insignificant, to be crossed in great strides, as though in flight, without looking to right or left."

Every other day Calvino walked to the farm with his father. Neither spoke, for the minds of both were elsewhere; the one already on the land, the other lost in the city. It was a struggle Calvino never really resolved:

"Every morning of my life is still the morning when it's my turn to go with Father to San Giovanni."




Second essay- A cinema goer's autobiography- is probably the best of all, Calvino meditates about his teens, surreptitiously attending movies. He often arrives late and leaves early.

Calvino talks about influence of cinema on his life- Calvino created a unique world of his own in cinema which provided him a realm of imagination, he conjured up a space of new dimensions where he could relate the world in consciousness to something tangible.

"A different world from the one around me, but my feeling was that only what I saw on the screen possessed the properties required of a world, the fullness, the necessity, the coherence, while away from the screen were only heterogeneous elements lumped together at random, the materials of a life, mine, which seemed to me utterly formless."

The narrative gaps and transpositions which result inspire the distinctive style of his own works.




Calvino- the soldier, fighting with the Italian partisans, has a comparable experience when he attempts to reconstruct a battle he had thought was a victory but which had in actuality been a defeat. To do so he uses signs to precisely invert the narrative. This third essay has a tragicomic tone, like the films of Calvino’s admired contemporary, Federico Fellini whose influence can be seen in the works of Calvino as most of the works of Calvino are surreal, mystical, like a lucid dream.

"The imagined memory is actually a real memory from that time because I am recovering things I first imagined back then. It wasn't the moment of Cardu'd death I saw, but afterwards, when our men had already left the village and one of the bersaglieri turns over a body on the ground and sees the reddish-brown moustache and the big chest torn open and says, 'Hey look who's dead.' and then everybody gathers round this dead man who instead of being the best of theirs had become the best of ours, Cardu who ever since he had left them had been in their thoughts, their conversation, their fears, their myths."




The fourth essay is characterized by humor about 'La Poubelle'- the dustbin, Calvino talks about existential purpose of agreement- 'La Poubelle Agree' which, according to him, asserts existence of a man.

"Thus daily representation of descent below ground, this domestic and municipal rubbish funeral, is meant first and foremost to put off my personal funeral, to postpone it if only for a little while, to confirm that for one more day I have been a producer of detritus and not detritus myself."


The final essay describes possibility of a reconciliation specifically through the writer’s relation to creative landscape. 'From the Opaque' in which the two extremes- opaque and the sunny- are deliberated. Calvino accepts that he is actually situated 'in the depths of the opaque' however he is attracted to 'sunny' and that, in writing, he is 'reconstructing the map of a sunniness that is only an unverifiable postulate for computation of the memory, the geometrical location of the ego.

Italo Calvino

[Steven Godin · Rating 3 out of 5]

When it comes to Calvino, I'd always chose his innovative and magical fiction than anything non-fiction, but this book caught my eye, and I do like him a lot, so I took the plunge. These five pieces, or 'memory exercises' as so called, do offer some indirect insights into how he conjured up his imaginary stories. These writings were collected by his wife, and tell of his difficult relationship with his father, who was a farmer and horticulturist, and had a passion for studying and acclimatizing exotic wildlife which filled the young Calvino with an investigative mind. He also recalls his love for cinema, before a graphic account of fighting fascists during the Second World War, that becomes a sort of meditation on the role played by imagination in the human memory. There was one piece where he analysis living in a house in a Parisian suburb, which was good. The book overall was OK, but nowhere as good as the best of his fiction.

[Argos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Calvino’nun dördü anı-anlatı, biri deneme beş kısa yazısı kitapta yer alıyor. Dili öykü ve romanlarından çok farklı, mizahı, o keskin ironi silahını hiç kullanmamış. Biraz uzun, bazen bağlantı cümleleriyle takip etmesi zor düz yazı kullanmış. Calvino’nun edebi yönünü değil, kendisini tanımak isterseniz okuyun.

[صان · Rating 3 out of 5]

نمیدونم کالوینو کمی پیچیده‌نویسی، (شاید کمی انتزاعی؟) داره یا ترجمه بد بود. اما‌ در کل بخش‌هایی از کتاب و نوشته‌ها برای من گنگ بود. مخصوصا فصل آخر که می‌تونم بگم تقریبا از کل اون صفحات در حد یک پاراگراف فهمیدم. فصلی پر‌ از تصویر که بیشتر شبیه یک شعر بود، که خود متن چیزی به من نمی‌داد، از‌ بس پیچیده بود، و ذهن من بود که از چینش اون کلمات به معنی‌ای (شاید خیلی سوبژکتیو) می‌رسید. اما فقط فصل آخر بود که‌ اینچنین پیچیده بود.

فصل اول درباره‌ی کودکیش بود که با باباش می‌رفته مزرعه خانوادگی‌شون، و از این مسیر و حس‌هایی که به پدرش داشت حرف می‌زد، از تفاوت‌هاشون. توصیفات و فضاسازی‌های روستایی خیلی جذابی داشت این فصل.

فصل بعدی‌ درباره سینما بود. خاطرات نوجوانی و جوانی یک خوره‌ی سینما و جلوتر از خلال سینما به سیاست و فاشیسم می‌پرداخت. بیشتر یک جستار‌ درباره‌ی سینما بود تا خاطره‌نگاری محض. البته تقریبا تمام فصول کتاب جستار بودن.

فصل بعدی درباره‌ی یک روز از جنگ بود که یکی از دوستاشو از دست داده. فرم روایی و بازیابی خاطرات در این فصل خیلی جوندار بود. نویسنده مثل شکارچی‌ای مست و ناهوشیار افتاده به دنبال خرگوش‌هایی سیاه در شبی سیاه.

فصل بعدی جستار یا مقاله‌ای بود درباره‌ی زباله و تولید زباله و نسبتش با انسان و مصرف‌گرایی و تمام موضوعات این حوزه، و از این شروع میشد که کالوینو داره اشغال‌ها رو می‌بره دم در! و طولانی‌ترین فصل هم بود. ایده‌های پراکنده و مختلفی داشت و چسبوندن این ایده‌ها به بیرون انداختن زباله، هنرمندانه و زیبا بود.

و می‌رسیم به فصل آخر که سخت‌ترین بود و انگار درباره‌ی پیدا کردن «خود» در جهان بود. چیزی ازش نفهمیدم. جهانی در آفتاب و جهانی در تاریکی که‌ در واقع این‌ها ادامه‌ی هم هستن و ممزوج در هم.

ممنونم از مترو که‌ بیشتر این کتابو توش خوندم، و در قطار مشهد تهران شروعش کردم، و پوست شکلاتی که پیرمرد و پیرزن بهم توی قطار‌ داده بودن شد صفحه‌نگهدارش.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 3 out of 5]

These "memory exercises" could not be called significant in my opinion, though they were occasionally interesting when they weren't rambling. I do not see the difference between these and ordinary literary reminiscences. One might spend their time reviewing the marginalia of Coleridge, or reading the literary reviews of Poe as well. It is really just a matter of how obsessed a person is with Calvino's writing, and the determination to read every word he wrote will be the only impetus for anyone to finish this book. If you want to know more about Fellini, or rubbish bins, give this one a perusal.

The weaker parts of the collection detracted from the stronger parts, the latter of which were the descriptions of his father. It seems to me any halfway decent writer could have written the other sections, as they consisted of everyday knowledge - with a few personal details about Fellini and Italian countrysides and cinema thrown in, culminating in well-expressed sentiments of a mundane and uninspired nature.

For Calvino PhD students only.

[Bina · Rating 4 out of 5]

I spent the better half of last weekend on the beach reading this book, which was left behind in the house where I was staying. It consists of a series of provocative vignettes that approach memoir, or "memory exercises" as Calvino called them. I re-read many of the masterful sentences in this collection, impressed (obsessed, even) with the powerful ideas underlying it.

Calvino plays with the very idea of memoir, and of memory itself.

When he recalls a battle, he begins with an extended metaphor of memories as sediment buried under a riverbed. He acknowledges the problems inherent in unearthing them: To explain his memories of war would be to "bury them again under the sedimentary crust of hindsight, the kind of reflections that put things in order and explain everything according to the logic of past history."

(This seems the defining problem of collective memory, or history, as professors like to call it.)

Calvino also struggles to represent figures from his past. In the title exercise, he describes his father, who espoused vast botanical knowledge. Instead of the taxonomical names his father taught him, Calvino recalls fantastical names for the plants... and then reveals his dilemma about recounting details that he never paid attention to in the first place.

(The problem of personal memory: What do we tell ourselves that we remember? What do we tell ourselves to remember?)

Another piece recalls his boyhood days at the cinema and how they transformed under fascist rule. It is a beautiful, nostalgic essay. For me, it's foremost a reflection on how regimes that limit the individual’s experience with art can also oppress the imaginative space. It reminds us that cinema plays a political role, in helping us to transcend reality, to believe in what lies beyond the physical boundaries of a tangible world.

The artistry of his prose is apparent almost everywhere. [I am tempted to dwell on his awesome use of free modifiers, what Virginia Tufte would call branching sentences, but I don't want to be a grammar Nazi; Calvino was distinctly anti-Fascist.] How much of this is owed to the art of the translator, I can't be sure. Even Calvino's father used a different one of his many tongues depending on the topic of conversation. He required a certain language to express humor (français, mais oui) or banality (English, of course.) Is it the translator Tim Parks, for example, who uses the word callow multiple times in one book -- and what's the word for this in Italian?

On Fellini, Calvino writes this -- which I think should be on the great filmmaker's gravestone if it isn’t already: “That is why Fellini manages to disturb us to the core: because he forces us to admit that what we would most like to distance ourselves from is what is intrinsically close to us.”

My favorite piece, though, is his 30something page-long rumination on garbage bins. It overflows with absurd free association. For Calvino, the act of emptying dustbins shows that the personal is political; it embodies our participation in a system and our acceptance of authority for reasons of convenience. (A sort of social contract theory centered on garbage, if you will...)
Trash is also existentially relevant ("we are what we don't throw away"). And for Calvino, no surprise, it's Marxist: What we do along the chain of trash distribution defines our social and economic roles, with the vividness of an orange peel or a scribbled-out page.

After reading that one, I fell asleep by the water, dreaming of a time when Calvino lived, so that we might spend an afternoon together not remembering. Like an abstract painting, the final vignette places you in a realm of possibility for time and space. It is, like most of his work, worth waking up for.

[Emre · Rating 3 out of 5]

Görüyorsunuz, nasıl ayrılıyordu yollarımız, babamınki ve benimki. Ama ben de çok farklı değildim: Aradığım yol, tıpkı onunki gibi, bir başka yabancılığın, insan üstdünyasının (ya da cehenneminin) derinlerinden kazıp açığa çıkardığım yol değilse neydi? Yarı karanlık avlu girişlerinde (bir kadın gölgesi, kimi zaman yok oluverirdi orada) gözlerimle aradığım şey, bütün söz ve şekillerin gerçeğe, somuta, bir yankının yankısının yankısı olmaktan çıkıp kendi deneyimime dönüştüğü bir dünyaya açılan aralık kapı, bakışımla kuşatacağım sinema perdesi, çevireceğim sayfa değilse neydi? Sf:18

San Giovanni'ye yaklaştıkça babam gene gerginleşirdi; bu, kendisinin hissettiği yegane yere bir an önce ulaşma arzusunun son bir dışavurumu değildi yalnızca, aynı zamanda sanki oradan onca saat uzakta olmanın pişmanlığı, o saatlerde bir şeylerin mutlaka yitirilmiş ya da bozulmuş olduğu kanısı, yaşamında San Giovanni olmayan her şeyi bir an önce silme isteğiydi; bir de, San Giovanni dünyanın tamamı değil, dünyanın yalnızca bir köşesi, kalan her şeyin kuşattığı bir köşesi olduğundan, bu yerin onun için her zaman bir umutsuzluk anlamına geleceği duygusu. Sf:27

Öyleyse o zamanlar sinema, bu bağlamda, ne anlama gelmişti benim için? Söyleyeyim: uzaklık. Bir uzaklık gereksinmesine, gerçekliğin sınırlarını yayma, çevremde ölçüye gelmez, geometrik kendilikler gibi soyut boyutların -ama aynı zamanda somut, kesinlikle yüzler, durumlar ve ortamlarda dolu, doğrudan deneyimin dünyasıyla kendi (soyut) ilişkiler ağını kuran boyutların- açıldığını görme gereksinmesine karşılık geliyordu. Sf:46

Şu kısa ömrümüzde, her şey orada, beyazperdede öylece durur, kaygı verici derecede varlığını duyurur; ilk sevgi imgeleri ve ölüm uyarıları her düşte bize ulaşır; dünyanın sonu bizimle başlamıştır ve sona erecek gibi değildir; yalnızca seyircisi olduğunu düşündüğümüz film, kendi yaşamımızın öyküsüdür. Sf:53

[Amirtha Shri · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is all about perambulation, the speed ranging from zero kmph to six kmph, walking uphill to grass, plants, green places, San Giovanni, walking downhill laden with roots, shoots, fruits, back to home, walking to the cinema in sunlight, walking out of it in twilight, walking with shoes on or without, weighed by machine gun ammunition on the back and a plate of chestnuts in the belly, walking to the pick up point of the dustbin man with La Poubelle Agréée / the approved trashcan, walking in a 2 dimensional space in his 6 dimensional world, walking into the opaque while simultaneously out of it, walking into words while simultaneously out of them, the ebbs and flows of memories, imaginations, and interpretations. To think of this as non-fiction is rubbish. All is fiction, every experience of every soul at every moment.

[Gaia · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5
Non avrei mai pensato di dire che il testo più bello di Calvino (letto fino ad adesso) sarebbe stato un racconto breve sulla pattumiera (la Poubelle Agreee).

[Alessandra · Rating 3 out of 5]

3,5.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

CONTENTS:
La strada di San Giovanni, 1962
Autobiografia di uno spettatore, 1974
Ricordo di una battaglia, 1974
La pueblo agree, 1977
Dall'opaco, 1971


4* Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore
4* Il cavaliere inesistente
4* Il visconte dimezzato
3* The Road to San Giovanni
TR The Baron in the Trees
TR Why Read the Classics?
TR Invisible Cities

[Tom LA · Rating 5 out of 5]

(English below)

Maro’… ma come scriveva, questo? Mi fa venire una nostalgia enorme per il mio Paese, anche solo leggere questi splendidi paragrafi.

Calvino è veramente uno dei pochi grandi. Nei contenuti era più scienziato e ingegnere, anche per questo la sua opera, per quanto profonda, manca di una profondità dantesca, ma l’uso che fa dell’italiano, alle mie orecchie che quasi non lo sentono mai (perché vivo all’estero), per me è come sorseggiare una zuppa preparata da uno chef con 3 stelle Michelin.

Un’espressione come “Dalla spregiudicatezza monellesca di Claudette Colbert all’energia puntuta di Katherine Hepburn” mi fa salivare il palato e strillare di gioia come una bambina coreana a un concerto di K-pop.

Come Moravia e un po’ anche come Roberto Gervaso e Montanelli, Calvino scriveva in una maniera forbita e sofisticata che però sembrava molto semplice in superficie. Che maestro, che maestro.

“La strada di San Giovanni” è uno dei suoi testi più personali e rivelatori, un piccolo laboratorio di memoria e autocoscienza. Calvino prende avvio da un gesto quotidiano – il cammino verso il padre e la città – per costruire una riflessione sulla distanza tra generazioni, sulla trasformazione della percezione e sul modo in cui la realtà si fa idea.

Nel racconto centrale la concretezza fisica della strada diventa struttura mentale: un percorso che attraversa la materia, la cultura e il tempo, per arrivare a una forma di conoscenza etica. Calvino indaga senza sentimentalismo il rapporto con il padre e con le radici, mettendo in scena la tensione costante tra osservazione razionale e residuo affettivo.

L’opera, scritta in una prosa limpida ma stratificata, mostra come la memoria non sia solo recupero, bensì esercizio di lucidità: un modo per misurare la distanza tra il sé che ricordiamo e quello che comprendiamo solo dopo averlo perduto. In questo senso, “La strada di San Giovanni” è più che un’autobiografia: è una meditazione sulla forma mentale della realtà, un itinerario che riflette il pensiero di chi, nella letteratura, vede sempre un atto di conoscenza.

L’ultimo racconto verte proprio su questo punto es è geniale, nonostante non l’abbia trovato particolarmente interessante rispetto agli altri.


————————————-




Jeeez… how did this guy write? It makes me feel an enormous nostalgia for my country, even just reading these splendid paragraphs.

Calvino is truly one of the few greats. In content, he was more scientist and engineer, which is why his work, though profound, lacks the Dantesque depth. But the way he uses Italian, to my ears that hardly ever hear it (because I live abroad), is like savoring a soup prepared by a three-Michelin-star chef.

An expression like “From the mischievous boldness of Claudette Colbert to the pointy energy of Katharine Hepburn” makes my mouth water and makes me squeal with joy like a Korean girl at a K-pop concert.

Like Moravia and, to some extent, Roberto Gervaso and Montanelli, Calvino wrote in a refined and sophisticated manner that seemed very simple on the surface. What a master, what a master.

“The Road to San Giovanni” is one of his most personal and revealing texts, a small laboratory of memory and self-awareness. Calvino starts from a daily gesture – the walk toward his father and the city – to build a reflection on the distance between generations, the transformation of perception, and the way reality becomes an idea.

In the central story, the physical concreteness of the road becomes a mental structure: a path that crosses matter, culture, and time to arrive at a form of ethical knowledge. Calvino investigates the relationship with his father and his roots without sentimentality, staging the constant tension between rational observation and residual affection.

The work, written in clear but layered prose, shows how memory is not just retrieval but an exercise in lucidity: a way to measure the distance between the self we remember and the one we understand only after losing it. In this sense, “The Road to San Giovanni” is more than an autobiography: it is a meditation on the mental form of reality, an itinerary that reflects the thought of someone who, in literature, always sees an act of knowledge.

The final story revolves precisely around this point and is brilliant, even though I didn’t find it particularly interesting compared to the others.

[Yasin · Rating 2 out of 5]

Edebi olmayan, belki bir amaç da gütmeyen iç dökmek için yazılmış yazılardan derlemeler yapılmış. Özellikle hoşuma gitmeyen bir şey yok ama yazarı Calvino bile olsa ilgilenmediğim türdeki yazıları sevemiyorum.

[Jay French · Rating 3 out of 5]

“The Road to San Giovanni” consists of five “memory exercises”. I found each of these chapters were written in a very different manner and strangely arranged in a sequence from the most sentimental to the most analytic. In that, I mean that the first three exercises were descriptions of things that had happened in the author’s life, and the last two are more commentary based on reflection and analysis. The end-posts here are mostly written fragments. The first exercise, the title story, is long descriptions, often long sentences with thoughts running together, describing the author’s childhood taking trips up a mountainside to the family garden. There’s a lot of description here, but it is run together so as to make reading a chore. It’s as if the author wanted to save his thoughts as rapidly as possible but using the most poetic wording he could. The second exercise describes the author’s cinema experiences as a child and young man. Here the writing is more like a typical short story, and there’s more than just description – some analysis is done concerning things like the impact of poorly dubbing English pictures had on later Italian movies. The third exercise concerns remembering a battle in WWII, where the author seems to remember more about what happened after some reflection. The fourth piece is about garbage cans and the act of disposing household garbage. Calvino dives into this one with gusto, and compares the French and Italian methods of garbage disposal, and how society seems to like similar, “agreeable” garbage containers. A fun analysis, but in the end it seems to be just an exercise when it could have been more. The last bit, called From the Opaque, is more indescribable. It purports to be about seeing at different levels, but other analogies, like a theater and a landscape, are drawn into the writing. This is written as snippets of what I’d call pseudo-logic, unpunctuated paragraphs of writing that sounds like it was lifted from a philosophical essay. This was really overwhelming to deal with since there didn’t seem to be a purpose beyond making the snippets of text to look philosophical and academic. If that’s what he was going for, he got it.

Overall, I found this a mixed bag. In general I liked Calvino’s writing. I did not enjoy the first or last exercises, although at least I found the first to be quite poetic and revealing. The middle three bits were most interesting, and closest to publishable essays. I found myself agreeing with the reasoning of the essay on garbage, and finding it quite interesting. Although I have not read other Calvino books, I suspect this is not a good introduction.

[Jamie]

I have missed Calvino.

[Aline Borges · Rating 3 out of 5]

Na dúvida entre 2 e 3, fico com a maior nota.
Confesso que terminei o livro com um certo dissabor. Não fosse a escrita excelente do Calvino e o poder de imergir o leitor até nas mais estranhas divagações (quantas vezes vemos uma problematização sobre o ato de levar o lixo pra fora?) meu descontentamento com o livro seria maior.
A proposta me parece interessante, uma coletânea de memórias e reflexões do autor perdidas ao longo do tempo e reagrupadas na obra. Tenho certo apreço por textos com o objetivo de apenas trazer um olhar reflexivo do nosso cotidiano, mas custo acreditar que um leitor não tão simpatizante acharia a leitura agradável. Ainda mais levando em conta o estilo do Calvino, com longas sentenças e passagens que não visam concluir um pensamento, mas apenas trazer o leitor para sua livre divagação.
Aliás, aqui preciso esclarecer que não o faço como uma crítica negativa ao autor em si, pelo contrário, as duas outras obras que tive a oportunidade de ler foram viagens maravilhosas, e incluo uma delas (Se Um Viajante Numa Noite de Inverno) como uma das melhores que já li.
Talvez parte da culpa no descontentamento seja minha pela expectativa que trouxe ao começar o livro, uma vez que meu contato anterior com as outras obras foi excelente, mas não consigo deixar de lado a sensação inócua que fiquei ao terminar de ler. Tirando algumas belas passagens, resta pouco de marcante ou para uma verdadeira reflexão.
A leitura (na minha mais humilde opinião) vale para o leitor que quer apenas apreciar a escrita do Calvino, mas não recomendo como primeiro contato, visto que a experiência pode ser um tanto maçante e afastar os leitores de um autor tão incrível.

[Richard Thompson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Connections, emotional resonances and attention to detail come together in the essays contained in this book to create a beautiful flow - a literary river with wavelets sparkling in the sun, white water around rocks in midstream, sometimes gurgling or roaring, sometimes barely moving but always flowing from somewhere to somewhere else. The contexts are different in the different essays. There are two biographical essays, the first about childhood, the second about war, an essay about Mr. Calvino's personal experience with movies, and an essay about garbage. The tone changes a bit in the final essay, which presents an abstracted geometric view of the world drawn with light, angles, and shapes, plus orientation without defined location, so that it all seems to be constructed from Platonic forms that are perhaps more imagined than real, or maybe it's the real world that is imagined and the opaque world is real. In the end, my favorite is the title essay that tells the story of Mr. Calvino's childhood, his problematic relationship with his father, who is loving, but disconnected from the son, and the son's inability to live the life his father wants for him.

The book is a short, easy read, not the most brilliant of Mr. Calvino's work but still an enjoyable excursion into his mind and writing style.

[Linda Franklin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great writer, interesting reading. Sort of autobio essays that he called "Memory Exercises" on five subjects that spread out because Calvino was a genius at memory and evocation. I like many "elderly" people either love to rummage in our memory or we hate it. I was glad to find so many ways and paths to take for a memory seeker like Calvino. Here's one quote from "Memories of a Battle" when he decides "to haul in memory's nets and see what's inside." That's sort of what it's like when you are partly asleep and partly awake "as if I were unable to unglue the sleep from my eyes, and perhaps it is precisely this imprecision that guarantees that the memory is precise... ." I have to write things down on a pad I keep by my bed. I'm always thinking of something, usually it starts with an eiditic image, which is how most of my memories are charged up. Calvino was sure he would write many more books, as Esther Calvino says in the very short Introduction. I'd like to imagine that I can imagine some of the ones he didn't get to write!
~ Linda Campbell Franklin

[Elia Mantovani · Rating 3 out of 5]

L'edizione raccoglie 5 racconti sull'infanzia dell'autore. Bellissimo, per chi è affascinato dalla nostalgia come me, quello che da il nome alla raccolta, ma anche quello su "La poubelle agréée", che consiste nella solita "calvinata", alla "Palomar", ove un elemento banale se non irrilevante della vita quotidiana (qui si parla dell'asporto della spazzatura), diventa simbolo e metafora di messaggi esistenziali. Sebbene preferisca sempre il Calvino dei grandi romanzi, dei Nidi di Ragno e degli Antenati, queste perle sono deliziose per assaporare un mondo che non c'è più, circonfusi da una malcelata malinconia.

[s · Rating 2 out of 5]

san giovanni'nin metaforik anlamlarıyla sevildiği fikrine kapılmış olarak almıştım ancak buna dair bir şey bulamadım, hikaye yavan geldi. sonrasındaki çöplü hikaye daha çok ilgimi çekti, calvino'nun biçemini ve nüktedan anlatımını görmek hoşuma gitti, yine de oturup bir seferde okuyamadığım için hepsi dağıldı, bir gün yeniden okumam icap edebilir, başka kitaplarıyla ya da olgularla birleştirmek için sihirli bir anahtar görevi görebileceğini düşünüyorum.

[Tuna Turan · Rating 1 out of 5]

Kitapta yazarın beş farklı konuda yazmış olduğu metinler derlenmiş. Kendisiyle yüzleşme notları olarak da adlandırabiliriz. Konu itibariyle beni çok etkilemediği için kitabın içine bir türlü giremedim. Bazı kitapları okumanın gerçekten zamanı olduğunu düşünüyorum.

‘Yalnızca seyircisi olduğunu düşündüğünüz film, kendi yaşamımızın öyküsüdür.’

[David Macpherson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first two "memory exercises" were amazing. The first is a piece of his father walking to and from the fields. The second essay was about watching American films as a kid in Fascist Italy. Wonderful. The third piece, about not really rememberinga battle during WW2 was good. The last two were so dull I don't even remember them. Weigh it all out, and it is worth a good deal for the good parts

[ser · Rating 5 out of 5]

calvino okumaya, otobiyografik denemelerinden başlamak bazıları için doğru bir tercih olmayabilir. zira, san giovanni yolu benim son yıllarda okuduğum en zorlayıcı kitaplardan biri. ama okuması zor olduğu kadar ödüllendirici de. calvino’nun sadece edebiyatına değil dünyayı görme ve algılama biçimine de aşık oldum. diğer kitaplarını okumak için sabırsızlanıyorum.

[Colin Bruce Anthes · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hard to "rate" this, as it's a personal, intimate, introspective entry. Those who start reading and are interested in connecting to Calivino in this way--which certainly will not be everyone--will adore the entire thing as I did, and find their own existential narrative activating.

[sanne_reads · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5-3* That last essay was just too opaque for me. ;)

[Gabriele Della Torre · Rating 4 out of 5]

Libro perfetto per entrare nella vita dell'autore.

[Anastasia · Rating 4 out of 5]

3,5 - 4 *

[Josh Decker · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of my favorite Calvino books so far! The writing was gorgeous, it has Calvino's common mix of normal storytelling and poetry.

[Leonidas Vergos]

Πέντε αυτοβιογραφικά αφηγήματα, πέντε τρυφερές, απλές και όμορφες ιστορίες από τη ζωή του Ίταλο Καλβίνο που αξίζει να διαβαστούν από όποιον αγαπάει το μοναδικό έργο του σπουδαίου πεζογράφου.

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a miscellaneous collection, but the essays all touch on the impermanence of life and memory in a way that gives the book an atmosphere of its own, outside of the content of each individual piece. It results in an almost haunting feeling, haunting because of how beautifully Calvino expresses memories of a time and place that no longer exist. His writing has a particular feeling or spirit to it that is hard to describe but always beautiful and immersive.

Notes

Talking to each other was difficult. Both verbose by nature, possessed of an ocean of words, in each other’s presence we became mute, would walk in silence side by side along the road to San Giovanni. To my father's mind, words must serve as confirmation of things, and as signs of possession; to mine they were foretastes of things barely glimpsed, not possessed, presumed. My father's vocabulary welled outward into the interminable catalog of the genuses, species and varieties of the vegetable world — every name was a distinction plucked from the dense compactness of the Forest in the belief that one had thus enlarged man's dominion — and into technical terminology, where the exactness of the word goes hand in hand with the studied exactness of the operation, the gesture. (pg. 10)

In short, all he wanted was a sign that civil cohabitation was possible in this world of his, a cohabitation prompted by a passion for improvement and informed by natural reason; but then he would immediately be oppressed again by reminders that all was precarious and beset by danger and once more the fury was upon him. And one of these reminders was myself, the fact that I belonged to that other, metropolitan and hostile part of the world, the painful awareness that he couldn't count on his children to consolidate this ideal San Giovanni civilization of his, which thus had no future. So that the last stretch of the path was covered in an unwarranted hurry, as though it were the edge of a blanket he could used to talk himself away inside San Giovanni… (pg. 25)


[T]hose baskets seemed insignificant then, as the basic materials of life always seemed banal to the young, yet now that I have but a smooth sheet of white paper in their place, I struggle to fill them with name upon name, to cram them with the words, and in remembering and arranging these names I spend more time than I spent gathering and arranging the things themselves, more passion… — no, not true: I imagined as I set out to describe the baskets that I would reach the crowning moment of my regret, and instead nothing, what came out was a cold, predictable list: and it's pointless my trying to kindle a halo of feeling behind it with these words of commentary: all remains as it was then, those baskets were already dead then and I knew it, ghosts of a concreteness that had already disappeared, and I was already what I am, a citizen of cities and of history — still without either city or history and suffering for it — a consumer — and victim — of industrial products —a candidate for consumerism, a freshly designated victim — and already the lots were cast, all the lots, our own and everybody else’s, yet what was this morning fury of my childhood, the fury that still persists in these not entirely sincere pages? Could everything perhaps have been different — not very different but just enough to make the difference — if those baskets hadn't even then been so alien to me, if the rift between myself and my father hadn't been so deep? Might everything that is happening now perhaps have taken a different slant, in the world. in the history of civilization — the losses not have been so absolute, the gains so uncertain?) (pg. 29-30)

[A]nd everything that once was is gone, everything that seemed to be there but was already only an illusion, an unaccountable stay of execution. (pg. 31)

So what had the cinema meant to me in this context? I suppose: distance. It satisfied a need for distance, for an expansion of the boundaries of the real, for seeing immeasurable dimensions open up all around me, abstract as geometric entities, yet concrete too, crammed full of faces and situations and settings, which established an (abstract) network of relationships with the world of direct experience. (pg. 60)

With the result that when I empty the small bin into the big one and lift it up by its two handles to carry it out of our front door, though still functioning as a humble cog in the domestic machine, I am nevertheless already taking on a social role; offering myself as the first link in the chain of operations crucial for collective cohabitation, I am confirming my dependence on the institutions without which I would die buried under my own rubbish in the snail shell of my individual existence, at once introverted and (in more than one sense) autistic. Is the departure point for proper clarification of the reasons that make my poubelle truly agréée: acceptable in the first place to me, even if not pleasant, as one has to accept the unpleasant without which none of what pleases us would have any sense. (pg. 98)

It was no doubt his obedience to Christian precepts which brought my friend to accept this role quite happily. And me? I would like to be able to say, with Nietzsche, “I love my destiny,” but I can't do that until I have explained for myself the reasons that have led me to love it. Carrying out the poubelle agréée is not something I do without thinking, but something that needs to be thought about and that awakens the special satisfaction I get from thinking. (pg. 101)

[A] rite of purification, the abandoning of the detritus of myself, and it doesn't matter whether we're talking about the very detritus contained in the poubelle or whether that detritus refers us back to every other possible detritus of mine; what matters is that through this daily gesture I confirm the need to separate myself from a part of what was once mine, the slough or chrysalis or squeezed lemon of living, so that its substance might remain, so that tomorrow I can identify completely (without residues) with what I am and have. Only by throwing something away can I be sure that something of myself has not yet been thrown away and perhaps need not be thrown away now or in the future.

The satisfaction I get out of this, then, is analogous to that of defecation, the feeling of one's guts unburdening themselves, the sensation at least for a moment that my body contains nothing but myself, and that there is no possible confusion between what I am and what is unalterably alien. Alas the unhappy retentive (or the miser) who, fearing to lose something of his own, is unable to separate himself from anything, hoards his faeces and ends up identifying with his own detritus and losing himself in it. (pg. 103)

Here we arrive at the economic crux of what I have hitherto chosen to refer to judicially as a contract and symbolically as a right: my relationship with the poubelle is that of the man for whom throwing something away completes or confirms its appropriation, my contemplation of the heaps of peels, shells, packaging and plastic containers brings with it the satisfaction of having consumed their contents, while for the man who unloads the poubelle into the rotating crater of the dust cart it offers only an idea of the amount of goods which are denied to him, which reach him only as useless detritus.

But perhaps (and here my essay glimpses an optimistic conclusion intermediately succumbs to the temptation), perhaps this denial is only temporary: is having been taken on as a dustbin man is the first step opus social ladder that will eventually make today's pariah another member of the consumer society and like everybody else a producer of refuse, while others escaping from the deserts of the “developing countries” Will take his place loading and unloading the bins. (pg. 110)

All that's left me and belongs to me is a sheet of paper dotted with a few sparse notes, on which over the last few years under the title La Poubelle Agréée I have been jotting down the ideas that cropped up in my mind and that I planned to develop at length in writing, theme of purification of dross throwing away is complementary to appropriating the hell of a world where nothing is thrown away one is what one does not throw away identification of oneself rubbish as autobiography satisfaction of consumption defecation theme of materiality, of starting again, agricultural world cooking and writing autobiography as refuse transmission for preservation and still other notes whose thread and connective reasoning I can no longer make out, theme of memory expulsion of memory lost memory… (pg. 125)