Path to the Spiders' Nests [Paperback]

Italo Calvino (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 4, 1999

Set on the Ligurian coast during World War II, this is the story of Pin, a cobbler's apprentice who lives with his sister, a prostitute, and spends as much time as he can at the local bar. But when he steals a pistol from a Nazi soldier, he sets off on a series of adventures with some partisans.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The [newly translated] preface is a remarkable piece of writing, a long, revealing, unquiet essay in intellectual autobiography, which should prove as rewarding to new readers as the spirited tale of the novel itself....The story reads well in Archibald Colquhoun's 1956 translation, now aptly and discreetly updated by McLaughlin, particularly in respect of numerous words and turns of phrase which are now misleading or meaningless....Calvino now has the status of a contemporary classic, devotedly studied and comprehensively admired. -- Times Literary Supplement

The coarse eroticism and the political idealism...were excised from the first English translation and are now reinstated....Time has treated The Path to the Spiders' Nests well. -- Independent on Sunday --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Language Notes

Text: English (translation)
Original Language: Italian --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 192 pages
• Publisher: Vintage (February 4, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0099473712
• ISBN-13: 978-0099473718
• Product Dimensions: 7.8 x 4.9 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 5 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #5,480,242 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars while the city is still visible, August 30, 2001

By 

Doug Anderson (Miami Beach, Florida United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Path to the Spiders' Nests: Revised Edition (Paperback)

I looked for this book for years after reading about it in a Gore Vidal essay I believe. Finally I noticed it was in print again and so I at last read it. This may not be Calvino's best to Calvino fans but to those of us who aren't particular fans of the Calvino style this is his first book and so the style isn't altogether there yet. To me that is a good thing. As artists become masters of their craft they begin to control their material to such an extent that nothing is left to chance. The charm of this book is that Calvino is not in complete command and so the book has a kind of raw innocence very suitable to its subject matter(WWII Italy) and lead character(a child). This is a very earthy book and that word does not apply to later Calvino. All the stuff is here that will later appear in more perfect form, but for this material he is in just the right form.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars at the margins of the resistance: funny, sad, chaotic, February 11, 2004

By 

Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Path To The Spiders' Nests, The Revised Ed (Hardcover)

This is an absolutely wonderful novel about a boy who wanders into the Italian resistance during WWII. There, he finds a hilarious panoplie of characters, from lice-infested peasant marxists to the hyper-intellectual young co-leader. Each person is rendered so vividly - and if you have ever lived in Italy you recognise the types - that the novel is extremely dense and pleasureful.

The plot is fairly simple: a young boy from a chaotic household has to flee after being arrested for stealing a pistol from his sister's German "client." (He was trying to impress the ineffectual drunks in his usual hangout, a smoky and dilapidated bar, and then gets caught up in the resistance.) All the time, he is lonely and desperately seeking a special companion, someone to love and take care of him. It is not a heroic tale, but one about what it was really like in the resistance: more about the pauses and boredom, the bad food and promiscuity, the strange thoughts by men risking their lives for murky as well as clear-cut causes - the socialist revolution or to rid their countryside of the Germans who steal their cows. This is a new and fascinating view, told with great wit and style. This is the first novel I read in Italian, and its vocabulary is difficult but wonderfully succinct and clear.

Warmly recommended.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars A humorous yet sad tale, February 8, 2010

By 

Israel Drazin (Boca Raton, Florida) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Path to the Spiders' Nests: Revised Edition (Paperback)

This is the first novel by the famed Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985) who composed it at age 23. It tells about the Italian Resistance against the Nazis during World War II.
Calvino introduces the novel with a 1964 preface in which he attempts to explain what prompted him to write the novel: the emotions created by the end of the war, the desire to describe the resistance movement and a need to defend the resistance. Yet, Calvino admits that he has not succeeded. He does not state why. Instead he gives a montage of different reasons that leave the reader confused. In fact he admits that he himself is confused why he wrote this book as he did. "The pages," he writes, "stand there in their impudent permanence which I know to be deceptive, pages which even then (when they were written) were at variance with a memory which was still a living presence...these pages are no use to me."
What is wrong with the novel? It won a prize when it was written. It sold about ten times its expected sales. It is very readable and flows well, except for several pages in which Calvino sidesteps from his story and describes the motivations of the resistance fighters.
Readers will have to make up their own minds. But it seems that in hind sight, Calvino would have preferred to write a straight-forward tale about the resistance. Instead, he wrote a story about a very young boy, whose sister was a prostitute who slept with Germans, who found himself among a band of incompetent resistance fighters, who he can't really understand. It is humorous, but it was not the book he wanted to write.