Time Lapse

By Paul Gray

DIFFICULT LOVES by Italo Calvino Harcourt Brace Jovanovich 290 pages; $14.95

When a writer achieves international renown, translators and publishers work overtime spreading all of the new celebrity's good words. This commendable practice has an unsettling side effect: careers can appear to run backward. The case of Italian Author Italo Calvino is instructive. His reputation grew from such cerebral narratives as Cosmicomics (1968) and Invisible Cities (1974); before long, Calvino's name was being bracketed between those of Borges and Nabokov in the fabulists' Hall of Fame. When Italian Folk Tales was translated and published in the U.S. in 1980, Calvino's exquisitely simple retellings of traditional material won richly deserved praise. Somewhat lost in the acclaim was the fact that the book, so different from the author's fictional experimentations, had been issued in Italy in 1956. Similarly, Marcovaldo (1983) offered a series of short stories in time-lapse translation. Calvino had not, appearances to the contrary, suddenly reverted to the methods of postwar neorealism; these were simply works that he had written after the war.

Difficult Loves may further confound the unwary. All of its 28 stories date from the 1940s and '50s. Their language (some pieces have been translated by William Weaver, the rest by Archibald Colquhoun and Peggy Wright) is straightforward, with nary a hint of narrative nudging. A few seem little more than sketches; in A Ship Loaded with Crabs, for instance, a group of young boys explores a half-sunken hulk, repulses a boarding by a rival gang and then swims off. But that is not quite all. A resonance lingers; the sound of splashing and the play of light and shadow remain to tease the imagination. If he had never gone beyond the skill displayed in these early efforts, the world might not have recognized Calvino; but the touch of the born storyteller is here all the same.

Animal Woods combines the desperate privations of war with the improbable magic of fable. The poor residents of an Italian village have learned how to cope with the unwelcome incursions of Fascist and German troops. They and their livestock just disappear into the nearby forest.

During one such raid, a peasant seems in danger of losing his prized cow to a soldier. Fortunately, the beast leads the invader into confusion: "The German on his way through the woods was making discoveries that left him openmouthed: chickens perched on trees, guinea pigs peering from hollow trunks. It was a complete Noah's ark." In The Adventure of a Bather, a respectable signora is horrified to discover that the bottom of her newfangled two-piece bathing suit has come off while she swims near a crowded beach.

She realizes that her romantic fantasies of being rescued by an anonymous male have been sadly misguided; the possible saviors now splashing in her vicinity all strike her as suspicious and sinister, "as if each of those men had been daydreaming for years of a woman to whom what had happened to her would happen, and these men spent their summers at the sea hoping to be present at the right moment."

The sea is a recurrent presence in these stories, both as an elemental force" that frees characters from land-based obligations and, more insistently, as a lens on another world. In The Adventure of a Reader, the hero compares a printed page to the plane of water "that separates us from that blue-and-green world, rifts as far as the eye can see, expanses of fine, ribbed sand, creatures half animal and half vegetable."

All of the scenes in Difficult Loves share some of this limpid strangeness: Calvino's deep visions seen before he began, inventively and entertainingly, to ruffle the surface.

--By Paul Gray