Marcovaldo: Or, The Seasons in the City

Priscilla Galloway was an English consultant in Willowdale, Ontario.

Italo Calvino is a name to conjure with among authors of international stature; an Italian, he is included in CBRA by virtue of his Canadian publisher. Published in Italy in 1963, but newly translated into English, Marcovaldo joins Calvino’s acclaimed If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller on the Lester and Orpen Dennys International Fiction List.

Marcovaldo is an unskilled laborer, a handyman in the shipping department at Sbav and Co. Marcovaldo’s unending optimism in the face of constant misadventure may remind some readers of Chaplin’s Little Tramp, others of Don Quixote. Through these twenty seasonal stories, one gets a wry view of Italian city life. Marcovaldo is an endearing innocent, a wise fool who can often share his insights with his children, but never with his wife.

When Marcovaldo finds a feast of mushrooms, they turn out to be poisonous. Fortunately, however, it’s not too serious. So many people got in on the free food that no one ate very many. He leaves the summer-hot room where his wife and three children are sleeping, in hope of a restful night on a park bench, but quarreling lovers and the night watchman, the blinking traffic light, and the stinking garbage truck conspire to defeat his hope. The rabbit he steals from the hospital has been infected with a fatal — and communicable — disease.

Later stories are increasingly surreal. Marcovaldo loses his way in the fog one night and gets on a “bus”; it’s actually a plane bound for Bombay. He enters into the world of cats and discovers the one small garden which remains in the concrete city, a garden filled with stubborn cats; the invisible marchesa, prisoner of the cats, steals the trout a cat had stolen from Marcovaldo who had hooked it through a transom from a restaurant fish tank.

Fable and satire combine in these stories. Marcovaldo nurtures a tree belonging to his company. He carries the ailing tree about on his motorcycle; it grows huge and healthy and then loses all its leaves. As company Santa, Marcovaldo is to carry gifts which destroy other gifts and so feed the maw of consumerism.

There is a splendid energy to these finely-honed stories, which are often extremely funny. The lover of wonderful writing will want to own this book.