Lost Childhood. Take Two

The Path to the Spiders' Nests, by Italo Calvino, is another story like Kosinski's The Painted Bird, that traces the experiences of an abandoned child during World War II. However, unlike the boy in The Painted Bird, Pin is not wandering among peasants and destroyed farms; he is playing being grown up, hanging out in taverns, ending up in prison and trying to join the Red Brigade fighters. But he is still a child, noticing butterflies, spiders, and forests full of rhododendron.

This Calvino's first novel and my first reading by this author. Again, I was expecting something different. Some reviews have likened this book to South American magical realism but I find only a weak comparison, probably because of the lack of eccentric, extended family members. Pin's bravado comes across more like gangsta wannabes. His lost innocence makes such bravado bittersweet.

Far more interesting than the story itself is the preface written by Calvino for the 1964 version. It is like reading Eggers' introduction to A Heartbreaking Work of a Staggering Genius. Calvino writes about the times and about writing. The only parts of the book that I marked as resonating were from the preface:

"What you read and what you experience in life are not two separate worlds, but one single cosmos. Every life-experience, in order to be interpreted properly, evokes certain things you have read and blends into them ..." and "Perhaps, in the end, it is only your first book that counts, perhaps you should only write that one and stop; you only make the great leap that one time, the opportunity to express your real self happens only onec, what you have to say inside you is either said at that point or never more ..." and what struck me the most, "There is another point: for those who start writing after one of those experiences that leave you with 'so many things to say' 9the war in this, and so many other cases), the first book instantly becomes a barrier between you and that experience, it severs the links that bind you to those facts, destroys your precious horde of memories - a horde in a sense that it would have become a reserve on which to draw permanently if you had been patient enough to husband it ..."

That defining moment in each author's life, those events that make him or her tell a tale that resounds, that concept scares me, yet explains underlying styles and themes that characterise Allende, Boyle, Irving, heck even Dickens.

I am straying ... is Nest picaresque? A bit. Definitely, a naive protagonist with huge misunderstanding of what dangers and bizarre events are happening around him. Pin's quest is normalcy and maturity, both of which are unfulfilled at the story's end. Connecting with Cousin implies that Pin is still on a path that is not enlightened. Perhaps accurately mirroring young Calvino's personal conflicts in his early 20s.