Customer Reviews

Path To The Spiders' Nests, The Revised Ed

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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.

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.

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.

Calvino's first novel is loosely based on his experiences as a young partisan during WWII. The overriding purpose seems to be to explode the myth behind the all-too-human countrymen who fought in the resistance. Rather than glamorize them as heroes, as had been done in countless books and tales of the period, Calvino takes great pains to show just how foolish, short-sighted and pathetic many of these men really were. Even harsher is his portrayal of the windbags in the barroom, who are quick to egg others on to action, but prove unwilling to take any such risks themselves. Of course he saves what is perhaps the very harshest criticism for his fictional sister - who is literally in bed with the enemy - and himself - in the person of the lonely street urchin Pin, who like the sister, is desperate to fit in anywhere with anyone at any price.

While this all may sound rather heavy and depressing, the viewpoint of the young lad gives it all a fresh and essentially non-judgmental veneer. Think of "The Wonder Years", only focusing on a homeless boy growing up under fascist rule. The characters are skillfully sketched, although hardly people one would care to know, and while the plot is not overburdened with action for a war novel, things move along a fair pace.

Calvino is best known for his technical fireworks, and while there are one or two spots where we see him developing these skills, for the most part the story is told in a very straightforward, chronological fashion. So Calvino's fans, who likely start each of his novels expecting a book unlike any they've ever read, may be disappointed at how pedestrian an approach the master takes to telling this story. On the other hand, readers who find Calvino's novels "too bizarre" may find this one surprisingly palatable, or at least comprehensible.

A fascinating tale of compassion and dispair in the postwar picaresque tradition of writers like Gunther Grass.
Told from the perspective of the boy, Pin, Calvino's vision is fresh and imaginative. The tale invites us to understand the resistance movement as one not only of bravery, but of anxious restlessness and chaos. Through the commander Kim, we see war--on either side--as the defense of the humiliated against their aggressors. No one is spared. In this, we see a bit of ourselves and the current political arena in Washington and Iraq.

Calvino's first novel served great in my World Lit class this semester--a quick, interesting tale that kept students reading for plot, while dishing up some delicious metaphor and imagery. The story follows Pin, a strange boy-man of a small Italian village during late WWII. His sister is a prostitute and he is the dirty boy of the town, a singer of obscene songs in the tavern, possessing a bit too much knowledge for a ten year old about what men do with women. Pin's coming-of-age journey is brought on by his theft of a German sailor's pistol, an act he is goaded into by the local resistance community. Pin's haphazard exposure to the partisans brings him into contact with potential father figures and potential Pins: boy soldiers that he could be himself one day, for better or worse. Through it all, he longs for someone with whom to share "the spiders' nests," a secret place near the village that comes to represent Pin's own history and psyche, among other things. Short but rich, with some fascinating detail and a few unexpected laughs.

Experimental, historical, cynical, considerably meditative, innocently gloomy, and yet, as the author indicated, exaggerated, distorted.

It is a hightly sophisticated first try, but as most first novels do, its narrative style lacks the harmony and refinement that the author has worked on in his later career.