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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,
By
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,
By Robert J. Crawford (Balmette Talloires, France) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (REAL NAME)
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,
By Israel Drazin (Boca Raton, Florida) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER) (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
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.
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