On Reading 'Marcovaldo'

Sailen Routray

I finished reading 'Marcovaldo' by Italo Calvino (1923-1985) just now. Just now means today; this afternoon. The inscription on the inner cover says, ‘Happy Reading; Love, Julu.’ ‘Julu’ being Odia filmmaker Bharadwaj Panda. I noticed the legend only after reading the book. I had forgotten that I had received the volume as a gift many autumns back. 

I would have started reading it at least four times; but being the dissolute reader that I am, never ended up finishing it till today. Perhaps that is not surprising, given the fact that 'Marcovaldo' is a small book (121 pages long, excluding the six lines long author’s note); it has always been difficult for me to finish short books than long ones.  

But this aside is not about my reading habits. It is about 'Marcovaldo' which is a collection of twenty stories (which are short, although not ‘short stories’ for sure – the shortest one, ‘The municipal pigeon,’ being less than three pages long and ‘The garden of stubborn cats,’ is the longest, at nearly 11 pages) around a character who shares his name with the volume’s title. 

According to an author’s note that precedes the book’s stories, their geography is an industrial city in the northern parts of Italy. The first few of these stories (it is not revealed by the author exactly which ones) were set in the early 1950s, in the immediate aftermath of World War II and the overthrow of fascism. And the last stories to be written date from the middle of the 1960s. 

Each story is set in a season – Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter – and this schema is evocative of a pastoral setting, where life is supposed to move in the familiar groves of circular, Arcadian time. However, Marcovaldo’s world in the north Italian industrial city could not be more distant from this. As a first-generation migrant, he longs for sleeping out in the open, the taste of wild mushrooms, and the simple joys of fishing, for example. Does he get his heart’s desire? I really cannot discuss any action that transpires in these stories without giving the stories away.

The stories move in cycles of four units – spring, summer, autumn, winter – (five in total; four fives are twenty) in an imposition of the rhythm of cyclical time on a collection of stories that apparently deals with events that a Marxist could read as stories of capitalist alienation. But these can be perhaps more productively understood as tales of re-enchantment through narrative. 

These stories alert us to the fact that the mythic is a part of the everyday, where the trickster character need not be embodied, and that the city itself can be a Maya created labyrinth where nothing is what it seems. Thankfully, although Marcovaldo’s city deceives, it does not kill, it does not destroy; unlike many of the post-industrial urban agglomerations of our global present.