of a poor little rich boy “too well aware of the difficulties of communication between human beings,” of “gulfs that separate the classes.” The narrator of the suddenly sinister “The House of the Beehives” is a recluse who at first appears to have become part of an ideal symbiosis of plants, animals, and insects: “Living on this bank of broom with goats and bees I don’t give anything and I don’t owe anything.” An honest alienation is preferable to the affected “intimacy” of domesticated animals: “We must devour one another” in this world. “In contact between human beings there can only, I know, be mutual terror and shame,” he moralizes. Then, he confesses to the “difficult love” of his life, now a buried crime: “That’s what I wanted, to see the terror and shame in her eyes; that’s the only reason I did it to her, believe me.”

Following this story is “Big Fish, Little Fish,” in which a withdrawn, passively weeping signorina, “unlucky in love,” is astonished into life when presented with an octopus, an image of fecund voraciousness. “A Ship Loaded with Crabs” makes a similar point from a different perspective. Gangs of children, playing war, discover “thousands of crabs of every shape which scuttled on their curved, spoked legs, and opened their claws, and thrust forward their sightless eyes. The entire hold of the ship was full of groping crabs, and one day the ship would move on the crabs’ legs and walk through the sea.” In each story, nature’s plenitude is deceptive, disguising a stifled human terror, or revealing a groping discontent, a gnawing anxiety.

The “Wartime Stories” which follow often seem to refer uncannily back to the glints of violence that flash through the dense green of these Edens. Their overt concern is with political as opposed to metaphysical alienation. Calvino’s neorealism has a studied simplicity which suggests the early Ernest Hemingway and which follows appropriately that of the child’s perspective in the “Riviera Stories.” At the same time that the stories are brutally descriptive, the “fabulous” Calvino continues into the grimmest of settings, creating the sort of naïve grotesquerie which one finds in authentic folk and fairy tales. “Hunger at Bévera” is viewed from the nearsighted perspective of an aged mule wearing blinkers. Wobbling along with its “muzzle bent down,” it notices “all sorts of things: snails, broken by the shelling, spilling an iridescent slime on the stones; ant hills ripped open and torn-up grasses showing strange hairy roots like trees.” Such concreteness of detail turns a simple surface into a microcosm. With a similar acuteness, the mule’s deaf master, Bisma, hears “confused boomings and strange disturbances of the earth” and correctly perceives that the world is “trying to change its old face and show its underbelly of earth and roots.” Calvino’s naïve characters—the very young, the very old, and the nearly blind who must continually see the world as for the first time—see a truth which only seems to come from the wrong end of the telescope. A German soldier in “Mine Field” experiences death as a miracle, a transformation, as “a hundred hands seized him, each by the hair, and tore him into hundreds of little pieces.” For him, the “earth became sun, the air became earth.” In “One of the Three Is Still Alive,” a German soldier thrown into a vertical pit expects death and instead is “reborn” at its other end: “Life, thought the naked man, was a hell, with rare moments recalling some ancient paradise.”

It is obvious that, even in these politically concerned stories, Calvino’s real interest is in the mind’s transformation of experience. As in his first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947; The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1956), which is on one level about the partisan experience, the war is overheard in the background. In the foreground, childlike characters create strange enchanted images and enact their inner dramas. “Animal Woods,” in which a German soldier is lost in a forest where the local peasants have hidden their animals, becomes a fabulous bestiary. In “The Crow Comes Last,” an apple-cheeked boy-soldier is trigger-happy. He shoots, miraculously, everything he sees: a hare, pinecones on trees, gilt buttons on a German’s uniform, a snail. His motivation is alienation in the metaphysical as opposed to the political sense: a need to transcend his sense of isolation from the rest of creation, of being oddly “separated from other things by yards of air.” When he aims the gun, the air becomes a “straight invisible line drawn tight from the mouth of the rifle to the hawk flying up there in the sky with wings that did not seem to move.”

The sharpshooter is an example of how, under circumstances of the most brutal reality, the mind survives by means of play or, as Calvino wrote in 1960 in Italian Quarterly, “lives by fantasy, irony, and formal accuracy.” The essay explains his conscious turn, beginning with Il visconte dimezzato (1952; The Cloven Viscount, 1962) to nonrealistic literary forms such as the fairy tale, the fable, and the philosophical romance. The “Postwar Stories” of the later 1940’s are almost farcical sketches illustrating this human need for fantasy. Although they take place in ravaged urban settings which suggest Calvino’s social concern, they are populated with grotesques such as those found in early Federico Fellini films—waifs and pimps, monomaniacs and fetishists. Wartime deprivations and far too much reality provoke urgent cravings and bizarre excesses—the sensuous gluttony, for example, of “Theft in a Pastry Shop.” A gang of thieves led by Baby break into a pastry shop and forget their original mission as the aroma arouses in them a “remote tenderness.” Soon Baby is flinging himself at the shelves, “choking himself” with cakes and, at last, with the intensity of extreme passion, “battling” with them in a “crisp and sticky siege which he must break through by the force of his jaw.” In “Dollars and the Demimondaine,” a sexual orgy is not very different: “Mouths met, almost flying through the air, and clung behind ears like clams; huge lips seemed coated with scarlet almost up to the nostrils.” Exquisite exhaustions, together with very crowded sleeping arrangements, provide the farcical elements in “Sleeping like Dogs.” “Transit Bed” is only superficially about the huge bed and massively mounded body of the prostitute Armanda. It is really about the pleasures of smoking, for which the fugitive Gim sacrifices his freedom. “Desire in November” is a whimsically misleading title for what might be the ultimate fur fetishist’s fantasy. Poor old Barbagallo, who for the last several weeks has gone naked except for a military overcoat, locks himself in an exclusive furrier’s shop, where he sinks into a “serene and dreamless sleep” on a voluptuous heap of furs and spends the night.

The fourth section, “Stories of Love and Loneliness,” anticipates the themes of the mature Calvino known to most English-speaking readers. It consists of eight “adventures” as seemingly unlikely as the cravings of the previous section were perverse: The reader encounters a soldier, a bather, a clerk, a photographer, a traveler, a reader, a nearsighted man, and a poet. As in the metafictions of Jorge Luis Borges, the adventures are more vicarious than actual. The bather, for example, a matron enjoying the freedom of a swim in the ocean, loses the bottom half of her bikini and becomes conscious, for the first time, of her human nakedness. It is something that seems suddenly to grow on her body, banishing “her alone, as if she were the only one who was naked.” As in the “Riviera Stories,” nature becomes the idyllic setting for a fall into conscious isolation and terror. A related paradox has to do with what consciousness cannot grasp or articulate. Federico V. of “The Adventure of a Traveler,” in love with Cinzia U., experiences his most profound feelings, moments of self-transcendence and timelessness, in transit between the northern city where he works, and Rome, where his beloved resides. Such feelings are beyond articulation and perhaps even memory: He realizes that he can never explain “anything of the significance of that night, which he now sensed was fading, like every perfect night of love, at the cruel explosion of day.” A clerk, who carries with him into the morning the secret memory of his night of perfect love, resolves to make his experience “implicit” in everything he does and says. As he so resolves, the memory evaporates in the opaque whiteness of daylight.

The borderline between illusion and reality, between the imagination and the world, between art and life, is the mature Calvino’s true subject and setting, as the stories in this section increasingly suggest. A nearsighted man gets glasses and must, for the first time, choose between seeing his beloved and being seen by her. A photographer becomes unable to distinguish between the reality which is photographed because it is meaningful or beautiful and that which is beautiful or meaningful because it is photographed. Taking pictures of Bice, he falls in love with her—or is it with his pictures of Bice? Attempting to expose the unreality of “half-crumpled and torn images” and at the same time convey “their concreteness as objects charged with meaning,” he ends up taking pictures of pictures.

Like the speakers in Roland Barthes’s A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments (1978), most of Calvino’s protagonists discover the “extreme solitude” inherent in the lover’s stance, even (or especially) when requited. The poet Usnelli is fulfilled in love with Delia, which means being “in a world beyond words”; it is like looking into the “core of the sun,” which is “silence”: The plenitude of the moment is such that it cannot “be translated into anything else, perhaps not even into a memory.” It is only the absence of love that can be articulated. Later, encountering a fishing boat, a picture of filth, poverty, and misery, he discovers a “turmoil of words” crowding “into his mind.” In Calvino, as in Barthes and Jacques Derrida, the word expresses only what is negative or absent, what is not with us. “The Adventure of a Reader” makes the same point humorously. The protagonist is torn between the seductions of a book and the attractions of a real woman on the beach, between making love and reading about lovemaking.

In “Riviera Stories,” Calvino begins by referring back to an imagined Edenic plenitude before words—before things needed names. In “Stories of Love and Loneliness,” he seems to refer forward to his most recent metafictions. Difficult Loves ends by exploring the paradoxes of the relationship between personal experience and writings: The last three stories are the adventures of a reader, a nearsighted man, and a poet. The collection becomes momentarily self-referential: In commenting on the difficulty of articulating the experience of love, these stories become emblems of the loneliness inherent in the writer’s act.