(no subject)

[proximoception]

Forgot one:

71. Into the War

Interesting but minor Calvino, three autobiographical stories. Only book I finished in the last eight weeks, as they've been hectic.

Comments

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

What is it about Calvino? He doesn't seem to fit with the rest of your group of eternals somehow. What's his appeal? I ask b/c I've only read a few of his things.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Seems lighter? That's deliberate on his part, and deceptive.

But wasn't Argentine Ant your favorite story for years?

[grashupfer.livejournal.com]

Yes, I love that story. But nothing else I've read touches it. I asked b/c I'm sure you could convince me I'm missing something.

[proximoception.livejournal.com]

Hmm. "Argentine" is like Rosencrantz & Guildenstern and Crying of Lot 49, an anatomy of various responses to a single impossible situation. Baron in the Trees and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler are similar, though they're more about writing and readings than life itself - but in a way implying writing and reading are the most important approaches to, metaphors for life. Perhaps that's why he seems uneternal, that he seems too literature-concerned or self-referential?

Calvino probably differs from peak Ibsen, Shelley, Tolstoy etc. by doing mostly one thing at a time, though that thing is usually a distinction between two others. He's turning puzzle pieces to see how they might fit, which can seem unimportant. He's not as invested in peak moments and paragraphs, though he has them in his fashion, especially at endings - he's kind of Spenserian in that there's always a plausible deniability that anything serious has happened at all, given his tone. Maybe they both get that from Ariosto. The hype isn't built through threat or language much.

It's built, for me, through coverage and exactness. In Cities, the better Cosmicomics and early stories he hits every possible angle of his chosen subject, and you're there at the end not with an apocalyptic reduction of the world or a sense of its vast omnidirectional escape from you, those lesser sublimes, but a unique capturing of the primary sublime, restoration of your own full stature in the world, through having covered all the possibilities of what world you might be in. You're in all of them at once, and happy to have the shadows withdrawn even if not every world is too happy. And happy that it's so much more than you'd at first thought - including much you'd hoped that would, excluding much you feared it might - but at the same time not so much that you couldn't follow it. You've followed all of it. And you find your own places, or series of places, and feel balanced finally just for having your various spins and stumbles categorized. Calvino's is the intelligible sublime.