New Italo Calvino

I have read one of Ital Calvino's stories, heard of him first from Gore Vidal and more of his since my stay in prison, and wish I could read more of him. The New Yorker reviewed “Last Comes the Raven,” a new collection, in English, of Calvino’s early fiction.

This might explain my interest - the possibility of learning something new from this writer:

The chief value of “Last Comes the Raven,” which was published in Italian in 1947, may lie in its revelation of an author on the way to becoming himself. Calvino was drawn to narratives as pure and potent objects; in this collection, he examines but does not deconstruct them. There are eerie, irreducible vignettes with titles such as “A Judge Is Hanged” and “Theft in a Pastry Shop,” which recount exactly what they say they do. There is the author’s trademark ironic distance and careful wit, as well as tinges of surrealism. But, where the mature Calvino found a style that was supremely arch, alien, and spare, his more mimetic stories retain the funk of the human. They unfold in specific settings—different parts of Italy during and after the Second World War—and are animated by the politics of their historical moment. When an old man pulls a “beast” from the waves, a thing green with seaweed and past mortal understanding, it isn’t actually a beast, as connoisseurs of Calvino’s later work might expect. It is a mine.

But this latest book, a collection of his earliest stories also sounds attractive:

It’s hard to know what to make of a Calvino who writes on this human scale, whose sorcerer’s tower has been downsized and filled with humbler, more lived-in furniture. Instead of awe, the reader of “Last Comes the Raven” registers a bloom of social feelings: sympathy, recognition, curiosity. When a character is cruel, she possesses a motivation. When she suffers, historical circumstances can help illuminate her pain. The book’s particular milieu—neighborhoods that have been scarred by the Italian civil war of the mid-twentieth century—may already be familiar to many American readers, thanks to the Neapolitan quartet, a series of blockbuster novels by the writer Elena Ferrante. (Ferrante’s translator, Ann Goldstein, is one of five to render these Calvino stories into English.) “My Brilliant Friend,” the first of the novels, was striking for how it mapped changes in its young characters’ thinking: Lenù, the narrator, initially understands her world as a child might, via ogres and enchanted shoes; only later does she connect the violence she senses with her city’s political past. Calvino’s work moves in the opposite direction, away from temporal or geographical coördinates and toward the elemental gloom of fairy tales. Was he flinching from trauma, one wonders, or sublimating it? Then again, why choose?