ANZ LitLovers LitBlog

Under the Jaguar Sun is an ideal book for those who fancy a taste of Italo Calvino (1923-1985), to see what his writing is like.  It comprises just three short stories:

• Under the Jaguar Sun
• A King Listens
• The Name, the Nose

At the back of the book, there is a brief note by Calvino’s Argentinian wife and translator Esther Calvino about his intention in 1972 to write a book about the five senses.  By the time he died in 1985, however, only the three published in this book had been written.

Had he lived, this book would certainly have evolved into something different.

In the light of Calvino’s previous works and given what he said to me—’How shall I make a book out of this?’—I believe he would not have stopped with sight and touch, the two ‘missing’ senses.  He would have provided a frame, as in If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, a frame that amounts to another novel, virtually a book in itself.

In fact in notes written a few days before he fell ill—when he had started to think about the book’s overall structure—Calvino refers to the importance of the frame and defines it:

Both in art and in literature the function of the frame is fundamental.  It is the frame that marks the boundary between the picture and what is outside. It allows the picture to exist, isolating it from the rest; but at the same time, it recalls—and somehow stands for—everything that remains out of the picture.  I might venture a definition: we consider poetic a production in which each individual experience acquires prominence through its detachment from the general continuum, while it retains a kind of glint of that unlimited vastness.  (p.84-5)

If you go to an art gallery where the curators have attended to the space around the paintings, you can see exactly what Calvino means.  The empty space allows the imagination to conjure more of the painting and its artist than is actually there. Clutter, or inappropriate juxtapositions of other works, interfere with the viewer’s personal response*.   So too in Calvino’s 1972 masterpiece Invisible Cities: it is the framing of the story that is fundamental.  The contest of ideas between a mighty ruler (Kublai Khan) and the intellectual authority of Marco Polo frames events which would otherwise be ‘just’ a fantastic subversion of the travel genre. (See my review here).

Esther Calvino, however, would prefer readers to consider the three stories on their own terms, and that is how I read them.

‘Under the Jaguar Sun’ is set in Mexico, where two travellers are undertaking a culinary tour: the only kind of travel that has a meaning these days, when everything visible you can see on television without rising from your easy chair. 

(And you mustn’t rebut that the same result can be achieved by visiting the exotic restaurants of our big cities; they so counterfeit the reality of the cuisine they claim to follow that, as far as our deriving real knowledge is concerned, they are the equivalent not of an actual locality but of a scene reconstructed and shot in a studio.) (p.12)

How much more true is this in our own time, when we can ‘visit’ anywhere in the world via the internet! (I wonder what Calvino would have made of ‘bucket list’ tourism and the selfie…)

Well, the couple are in search of something really different and exotic, and Mexico being the home of the Aztecs and human sacrifice… Olivia is determined to satisfy not only her curiosity…

Olivia still didn’t seem satisfied. ‘But this flesh—in order to eat it… The way it was cooked, the sacred cuisine, the seasoning—is anything known about that?’ (p.19)

From the sense of taste, ‘A King Listens’ interrogates the sense of hearing.  As in Invisible Cities this king is reminiscent of Kublai Khan, trapped by his own power, fearful of losing it and unable to trust anyone in his realm.  The beginning is Calvino at his playful best, in a perfect translation rendered here by William Weaver:

The sceptre must be held in the right hand, erect; you must never, never put it down, and for that matter you would have no place to put it: there are no tables beside the throne, or shelves, or stands to hold, say, a glass, an ashtray, a telephone.  High, at the top of steep and narrow steps, the throne is isolated; if you drop anything, it rolls down and can never be found afterwards.  God help you if the sceptre slips from your grasp; you would have to rise, get down from the throne to pick it up, no one but the king may touch it.  And it would hardly be a pretty sight to see a king stretched out on the floor to reach the sceptre fetched up under some piece of furniture—or, when it comes to that, the crown, which could easily fall off your head if you bend over. (p.33)

‘The Name, The Nose’ is the shortest of the three stories. From a frantic search in Madame Odile’s Parfumerie to identify a woman by her own elusive scent, to a lament for the days when humans ran along, heads down, never losing contact with the ground, using hands and noses to help us find the trail…

We understood whatever there was to understand through our noses rather than through our eyes: the mammoth, the porcupine, onion, drought, rain are first smells which become distinct from other smells; food, non-food; our cave, the enemy’s cave; danger—everything is first perceived by the nose, everything is within the nose, the world is the nose. (p.71)

That sense of smell is lost, compromised by the horrid smells of the modern world as experienced by a modern drummer.

In the end, I go out to breathe in the morning, the street, the fog, all you can see in the dustbins: fish scales, cans, nylon stockings; at the corner a Pakistani who sells pineapples has opened his shop; I reach a wall of fog and it’s the Thames. (p.80)

2023 was the anniversary of Calvino’s birth, but I have two more titles in my pile of ‘Novellas in November’ and shall tackle them in due course.

Author: Italo Calvino,
Title: Under the Jaguar Sun
Translated from the Italian by William Weaver
Publisher: Penguin Modern Classics, 2009, first published in Britain by Secker & Warburg in 1983
ISBN: 9780141189727, pbk., 85 pages
Source: Personal library

*See, for example, the ‘Australiana: Designing a Nation’ exhibition at the Bendigo Art Gallery, which is a dreadful mess of iconic Australian paintings, juxtaposed with kitsch and angry Aboriginal artworks. The show was excoriated by Christopher Allen, art critic for The Australian in his (sorry, paywalled) article ‘The best (and worst) art of 2023’, but this review mirrors my impression of it.  None of the art works could be seen on their own terms.