ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

My plans to read Italo Calvino during Novellas in November fell apart, as most of my plans do, but this year I had read only two more books of the 1001 that I must read before I die, so here we are with Italo Calvino’s first novel, The Path to the Spiders’ Nests, leaving me with 118 more on the TBR with a mere 495 more to acquire and read before my eyes give out…

Ha!

Anyway, what an amazing first novel it is. It’s nothing like the weird and wonderful experimental fictions for which Calvino is famous: based on Calvino’s real-life experience in WW2, it’s a coming-of-age story of an orphan called Pin who inadvertently falls in with a group of Italian partisans.  Pin is a cobbler’s apprentice, but his employer Pietromagro is mostly in gaol for one thing or another, and his sister is preoccupied with making a living as a prostitute, so he grows up neglected, lazy and foul-mouthed.  However — as it says in 1001 Books —

…he is worldly enough to use local gossip to his advantage; he is also a child who craves adult attention, but only crudely and imperfectly understands how to capture and retain it.  The irony is that the two things Pin utterly fails to comprehend — politics and women — are those that equally mystify most of the other characters.  (1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die, edited by Peter Boxall, 2006 Edition, Quintet Publishing 2006, p 436.)

Pin is an exasperating child.  He hangs around the bar picking up gossip and hurling filthy insults at the drinkers, so it’s hard not to read between the lines that those who gave him the risky task that sets the plot in motion, wouldn’t have minded too much if he hadn’t survived it.  They ask him to steal a German sailor’s pistol…

The high tension scene where Pin crawls into his sister’s room to get the pistol from her client is followed by an abrupt coming down to earth.  Back at the bar, the men are quietly discussing the formation of a small partisan unit and they are not interested in Pin’s carefully rehearsed theatrics.  When he doesn’t get the attention he craves, he runs away and hides the pistol.

But, because he’s only a foolish boy, he doesn’t hide the belt. He struts back into town brandishing it as he rehearses how he’s going to impress everybody.  The sailor recognises his belt and that brings Pin into the orbit of the Germans and the Fascists.

Yes, the Germans are worse than the municipal guards.  With guards, Pin could at least, if nothing else, begin joking, and say, ‘If you let me go, I’ll arrange for you to go to bed free with my sister.’

But the Germans cannot even understand what he says, and the Fascists are men he has never seen before, men who do not even know who his sister is.  (p.55)

His sister and the sailor are both also at the interrogation, and Pin knows that the sailor has made up a story about the pistol to deflect any blame for losing it.  Overnight, Pin has been kept awake by threats from Michel the Frenchman, who has promised to kill him if he talks about what he heard in the bar.

Pin could not get off to sleep; he was used to being beaten and that did not frighten him very much, but he was in an agony of doubt about the best line to take up at the interrogation. He would have loved to revenge himself on Michel and the others and tell the Germans straight away that he had given the pistol to the men in the tavern, and also that they had formed a Gap [Gruppo Azione Patrioti. A small unit of partisans]; but to turn into an informer would be another irreparable action, like stealing the pistol; it would mean he would never be stood another drink in the tavern, or be able to sing or listen to dirty stories there. And then he might also involve that man Committee, who was always so glum and miserable, and Pin would have been sorry about that as Committee was the only decent man among the lot. Pin would like Committee to arrive now, all wrapped up in his raincoat, enter the interrogation room and say, ‘I told him to take the pistol.’ That would be a fine gesture, worthy of Committee, and no harm would come to him for it either, for just as the S.S. were going to lead him off to prison, there would be a shout, like at the cinema, of ‘Here come our lads!’ and Committee’s men would rush in and set them all free. (p.56-7)

This blend of street-smart bravado and naiveté is enough to make a reader weep…

Well, the lad escapes, and finds himself among a band of partisans (who also don’t believe he has a pistol).  Demolishing any concept of the partisans as heroic, Calvino depicts these men as the dregs, siphoned away from the main game by the resistance leaders, because they are stupid, lazy, unreliable, and ultimately disposable. None of them really know what they are fighting for: Italy has switched sides and now the their allies the Germans are their enemy.  Though they are without charm, these characters remind me of the ‘little people’ in Louis de Bernières’ Birds without Wings (2004) which tells the story of those caught up in historical events beyond their understanding or control.

But they do have some scruples: they keep Pin out of harm’s way by assigning him to help the cook, and before long he is up to his usual clownish, vulgar and offensive tricks.  But the time comes when the detachment has to engage with the Germans, and as the bombs rain down on their families in the village the full horror of what lies ahead becomes clear.  Even though we know the eventual outcome of the war, the outcome of this forthcoming battle looks grim, even if they win.  Which seems unlikely, given the superior military discipline of their enemy.

To say more would be to spoil the denouement… suffice to say that Pin navigates a perilous and confusing time, with a small glimmer of hope in man’s humanity to guide him on his way.

There’s a bit of publication history that goes with The Path to the Spiders’ Nests which derives from Calvino’s distaste for it once he realised his novel was going to be read by more than a few Italians, including some of the partisans with whom he fought in WW2. In my edition, both the translator and Calvino explain the ins and outs of the reasons for its revision, but to my mind, the justifications look like historical revisionism.  Although he says so very elegantly in his mea culpa essay, it looks like Calvino was embarrassed by the way he portrayed his compatriots among the Italian partisans as brutish and stupid.  Caricaturing them as he does in this novel when their status as heroes in the postwar era was becoming sacrosanct the way our Anzacs are, would have compromised his career as an author.

Whatever about that, this novel captures a child’s eye view of a complex situation.  My late neighbour Nello was a boy just a little older than Pin when he fought with the partisans, and The Path to the Spiders’ Nests is a window onto what his experiences might have been.

Author: Italo Calvino
Title: The Path to the Spiders’ Nests (Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno)
Translated by Archibald Colquhoun, translation revised by Martin McLaughlin
Note to the 1998 Translation by Martin McLaughlin
Preface to The Path to the Spiders’ Nests by Italo Calvino, 1964
Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2009, first published 1947, revised 1964
ISBN: 9780141189734, pbk., 185 pages
Source: personal library

BTW The cover art is attributed on the back cover to a detail from ‘The Arrival of St Ursula during the Siege of Cologne’, 1498 by Vittore Carpaccio, which may be the title of the painting in some other source, but at Wikipedia here the painting is called ‘The Arrival of the Pilgrims in Cologne’ in the same cycle of paintings  called ‘The Legend of Saint Ursula’. St Ursula had made a pilgrimage to Rome, and on her way back was martyred by the Huns at Cologne but there’s no sign of her (or any other woman) in that painting.