What you read and what you experience in life are not two separate worlds, but one single cosmos. Here I go again! Another review and my Dearest Calvino.It’s been a spectacular reading year for me. I got to know some great people, got some great book recommendations and of course read some great books written by great authors. Of them I read the following writers for the first time (No Kidding!) : Vladimir Nabokov, Haruki Murakami, David Mitchell, David Foster Wallace, Virginia Woolf, Rohinto

Garima's "It’s not his best novel but it was definitely his first..." sums it up pretty well. Maybe it sounds better in Italian. But as is, meh.

Featured in my Top 5 Italo Calvino Books: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wHHJq...Although not quite as elegant as Calvino's later efforts, The Path remains a heartbreaking work about one of Italy's most painful historical moments, and a novel where misery (although abundant) never manages to dispel hope.

My favourite Calvino work so far, no doubt about it! The story of the young lad Pin, living in a small Italian village with his prostitute sister and spending his days hanging around the local bar with the men-folk, making them laugh and winding them up. Everything changes however, when he joins the resistance movement and ends up hiding in the hills with a small band of local revolutionary soldiers, determined to be taken seriously as one of them. Its one of those novels that flows really well

A bit of juvenilia from Master Italo. Turns out before Calvino wrote the gloriously weird novels of his later life, he was more interested in describing the adventures of a young, left-leaning partisan (not unlike himself, really) fighting the fascists, and the ragtag band of resistance fighters he cliques up with. You can see the later Calvino in the younger, you really can, but it's more interesting for me as a Calvino completist to see what his earliest visions looked like.

"When I began to expand a story about a little boy partisan whom I had known in the partisan groups, I did not think that it would become more substantial than the other stories. Why did it turn into a novel? Because - later I realized - the identification between myself and the protagonist had developed into something more complex. The relationship between the character of the boy Pin and the partisan war corresponded symbolically with the relationship that I myself had eventually had with that...

It is Calvino's first novel, and the story of the Resistance’s arduous path to victory made even more remarkable because it is seen through the eyes of a young boy named Pin. The boy is seemingly no innocent, he sings bawdy songs, often fights and effectively pimps for his older sister's prostitution. But in the ways of politics, and the coming of the war he is quite naïve. Initially when the Germans arrive he cannot decide who to support, he likes the uniforms of the Nazis, but decides on the R...

Reads like work of a great writer still learning his craft and that makes sense it was Calvin's first novel. The theme of a child exposed to world of adults - of sex and war, without being able to understand it fully and without an adult to make him feel safe is awesome but never achieves its full potential. The story just never spoke to me.

This was the author’s first book. He intended it to be a novel about the Italian resistance fighting the fascists and the German occupiers during WW II, but it ended up as more of a story about lost youth – a boy who grew up in the streets during the war and never had a childhood. (The author fought as a member of the resistance.)In the preface we get a 24-page analysis of the author’s thinking about the novel over the years. He published the book in 1947 and at times regretted writing it, going...

Calvino’s first novel written shortly after his wartime experiences as a partisan. His prevailing priority seems to be to debunk the myth of the noble heroic freedom fighter. I can imagine its somewhat cynical tone would have caused a rumpus when first published in 1947. He states in the preface that his aim was twofold – to launch an attack at both the detractors of the resistance and against the “high priests of a hagiographic Resistance that was all sweetness and light.” Personally I saw a lo...

We are in Liguria, a rugged region of Italy overlooking the Mediterranean coast. We follow the daily life of a band of partisans coming up against the fascists and the Germans. Our resistance fighters are not the thunderbolts of war; it is a heterogeneous collection of individuals representing the scum of the armed struggle, of all those who are hardly considering reliable, not very seasoned, damaging the prestige of the resistance. So we cannot say that they are really on the front line of oper...

If there's ever a character that I'd like to give a good clip around the ears to then there's none more so than Calvino's protagonist here - Pin. The cocky little runt! But that's not the main reason this is, in all probability, my least favourite Calvino, nor the fact that this was his first novel (which, as coming-of-age stories and first novels go, isn't bad) it's simply down to the fact that he doesn't handle realism as good as his trademark magic-realism. Considering WW2 rages on in the bac...

"You're only a child interested in spiders' nests, what can you do with a pistol?" (78)This little rascal, this wee imp, will make you laugh and cry. A true pariah, Pin mostly hangs out with adults & is treated like one. So when a German's gun goes missing, who goes to jail?I cannot help but compare this to American Huckleberry Finn. The Everyboy is a figure that we both love and hate, it's emblematic though, yes, immature. Here, because there is a war going on, our wee one has to get his hands

Calvino's first book has often been criticised for not being one of his later masterpieces. Well, I disagree with that, unsurprisingly, considering I am a teacher after all and have committed to the idealistic task of seeing potential in beginnings, of finding future sculptures in blocks of marble and jewellery in various metals in deep mountains. Excavating genius in its raw origin is a form of belief in the future. And this Calvino is already a Calvino, even though it may not yet be the mature...