Italo Calvino - Adam, One Afternoon

Adam, One Afternoon is a collection of early Italo Calvino short stories, written around the time of the Second World War. They occupy an unsettling niche between the ordinary realist work of the Thirties and Forties, and the inventive, experimental puzzles of Calvino's later work. The stories, by turns comedic, violent and fantastic, carry with them the laughter of an author who isn't quite willing to let his readers in on the joke.

The collection begins harmlessly enough, with a small girl interacting with the new gardener's boy. They are both children but she is wealthy and he is not, and she is connected to the world of money, prestige, manners and expectations and he, somewhat oddly, seems more in tune with plants and animals, particularly amphibious creatures. They are attracted to one another, though the girl is skeptical of his approach. He gives her gifts, invariably some soggy thing he found under a rock, and she screeches away- but comes back eventually. In the end, he promises her a great big present, and she is happy, thinking that he has learnt the error of his ways. Her happiness lasts until the boy fills the house: "On every plate she had left to dry there was a crouching frog; a snake was coiled up inside a saucepan, there was a soup bowl full of lizards, and slimy snails were making iridescent streaks all over the glasses."

The first handful of stories follow a similar vein, mostly charting the lives of peasants and the gentle absurdities of their lives when viewed in a slightly skewed manner. There is one particularly excellent story concerning some robbers in a cake store, and their excited gorging that lasts the night and almost ends with their capture by the police. Calvino is - and excuse the language - showing the 'magic' of the ordinary. The first half of the book contain stories that could easily occur, even on a regular basis, and are not out of the ordinary except for their insistent focus on the small areas of interest rather than the expected trappings of plot and character. To be sure, there aren't really characters in the ordinary sense - these people are functions, designed to facilitate the author's intent.

The middle section of the collection - and this middle section extends right up to the second or third last story, harnesses the growing darkness of the early stories and explores the difficulty of existing during war-time. Soldiers are invariably shown as uncouth, mean and crude, and war is something of a folly that belongs to others, and not the villagers. Certainly their lives are difficult, and made more difficult by the violent demands of the soldiers, whether Italian or not, but it's all a bit of a game, a laugh, a push from a higher force that can't really be argued with or stopped, only accepted along with everything else.

Some of these stories are really quite charming, such as The Crow Comes Last, which is concerned with a young boy and his ability with a rifle. He is so good he can shoot trout while they swim, and pine-cones as they hang from branches. He asks for a rifle and the soldiers give him one, and laugh and clap as he shoots. A few days later an enemy soldier shoots at the boy and grazes his cheek and the boy, thinking it something of a game, starts to hunt the soldier, frightening him with the deadly accuracy of his shots. Though this story is very violent, and ends with a death, the boy's glee and pride in his ability spreads ripples of innocence through the text. Many of the war stories mine a similar vein, finding the simplicity, joy and innocence in death and tragedy. Calvino makes this work by avoiding proselytising divergences, and refraining from having his peasants - or his soldiers - speak in words wiser than you would expect from them. They are not mouthpieces for an ideology, though Calvino is clearly amused by the serious nature of war, but simpler creatures, more elemental and attuned to the currents of their surrounds.

The final story, The Argentine Ant, is easily the strongest of the collection. It has nothing at all to do with the war, and strays far into the complex, fantastic habits of Calvino's later fiction. A young couple have recently moved house, settling into a good neighborhood where they hope to raise their young son and put down firm roots. There is, unfortunately, a certain problem - ants, and lots of them. Not to worry, the unruffled couple spray the ants and clear away what they can. Doesn't every old house have some problem? And ants are a fairly small nuisance, anyway. But the ants return, day after day, and there are more of them, an endless stream it seems. They find their way into the food, into the baby's crib, into the mattresses and furniture and walls and floors and their clothing. The neighbours on one side spend their entire day concocting new pesticide combinations and arranging them in geometric patterns around the house to provide walkways for themselves against ants; the neighbour on the other side is an inventor, whiling away his hours creating death traps for ants.

The story follows the husband, who visits each of his neighbours and learns how they deal with the ant problem. Some of them have been fighting the ants for two decades; nobody at all expects that the battle will ever be won. Calvino tells us this story in a tone that is matter-of-fact, collected, and calm, though you can almost see the twinkle of amusement in his eye. The joke is never broken, never given up, with Calvino dancing on the edge of absurdity. A slip, and the story would be ruined, but thankfully he retains his footing.

The collection as a whole is strong, and interesting as a document of Calvino's growth as an author. These stories were written in his twenties and thirties, and there are times when you can feel him testing new waters to see how well he can swim. The Argentine Ant shows most clearly the direction his writing would go on to take, but in each and every story there is something irresistibly Calvino. These stories also have the added bonus of not being as difficult as some of his later work - so, in effect, you can have the complexity and oddity of Calvino without worrying too much about the headaches of experimental fiction, if that isn't your thing. Certainly a worthwhile collection, and recommended if you can find it in print.

Author	Italo Calvino
Title	Adam, One Afternoon (Mostly taken from Ultimo viene il corvo)
Nationality	Italian
Publisher	Picador
Published	1958 (English) 1949, 1952 (Italian)
Pages	190
Availability: ---Amazon (US) ---Amazon (UK) ---Book Depository ---Booktopia

See Also

Calvino, Italo - If On A Winter's Night A Traveller

Links

Links kindly provided by The Dalkey Archive Press' anthology, Best European Fiction 2010

Il Club degli Autori
Ellin Selae Associazione Letteraria
The Ministry for Cultural Heritage and Activities
Il Primo Amore
Romanzieri
Vibrisse, Bolletino