Mr Palomar

Mr Palomar (recommended to me by Sam Vega) is a short work of fiction by Italian write Italo Calvino. It’s a fascinating book, summarised by Wikipedia thus:-

In 27 short chapters, arranged in a 3 × 3 × 3 pattern, the title character makes philosophical observations about the world around him. Calvino shows us a man on a quest to quantify complex phenomena in a search for fundamental truths on the nature of being.

The first section is concerned chiefly with visual experience; the second with anthropological and cultural themes; the third with speculations about larger questions such as the cosmos, time, and infinity. This thematic triad is mirrored in the three subsections of each section, and the three chapters in each subsection.

This summary doesn’t convey the subtly innocent honesty of Mr Palomar’s neurotically enquiring nature. What am I to think, given my limitations? What am I to do when faced with those inevitable frustrations Mother Nature always springs on me just as I begin to think I may be on the right track?

In fact the naive, detailed  subtlety of Mr Palomar’s enquiring mind is not easy to summarise without quoting most of the book, because Calvino presents us with an extraordinarily human portrait which is at the same time generic. We all have a Mr Palomar within us, but only to the extent that we are aware of ourselves interacting so imperfectly with that delightfully impossible complexity which is the natural world.

The book is almost excessively quotable too. Here are a few, beginning with Mr Palomar’s baffled attempts to cope with the sight of a topless woman on the beach.

He turns and retraces his steps. Now, in allowing his gaze to run over the beach with neutral objectivity, he arranges it so that, once the woman’s bosom enters his field of vision, a break is noticeable, a shift, almost a darting glance. That glance goes on to graze the taut skin, withdraws, as if appreciating with a slight start the different consistency of the view and the special value it acquires, and for a moment the glance hovers in mid-air, making a curve that accompanies the swell of the breast from a certain distance, elusively but also protectively, to then continue its course as if nothing had happened.

I particularly like this one, possibly because of how close it is to Spinoza's view:-

Or what if everything that exists were language, and has been since the beginning of time? Here Mr Palomar is again gripped by anguish.

And these two – the worrisome thought that there are things we ought to know and notice about the natural world in order to become a rounded person.

When it is a beautiful starry night Mr Palomar says: “I must go and look at the stars.” That is exactly what he says: “I must,” because he hates waste and believes it is wrong to waste that great quantity of stars that is put at his disposal. He says “I must” also because he has little practical knowledge of how you look at the stars, and this simple action always costs him a certain effort.

This observation of the stars transmits an unstable and contradictory knowledge – Palomar thinks – the exact opposite of what the ancients were able to derive from it. Is this because his relationship with the sky is intermittent and agitated rather than a serene habit?

This one is a favourite too. 

“It is only after you have come to know the surface of things,” he concludes, “that you venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface is inexhaustible.”

Finally, an example of Calvino’s intriguing view of time.

A person’s life consists of a collection of events, the last of which could also change the meaning of the whole, not because it counts more than the previous ones but because once they are included in a life, events are arranged in an order that is not chronological but rather corresponds to an inner architecture. A person, for example, reads in adulthood a book that is important for him, and it makes him say, “How could I have lived without having read it!” and also, “What a pity I did not read it in my youth!” Well, these statements do not have much meaning, especially the second, because after he has read that book, his life becomes the life of a person who has read that book, and it is of little importance whether he read it early or late, because now his life before that reading also assumes a form shaped by that reading.

If on a winter's night a traveller

The conflict between the world’s choices and man’s obsession with making sense of them is a recurrent pattern in what I’ve written.

Italo Calvino  

You open AK’s blog to find he’s written something about that novel If on a winter’s night a traveller by an Italian writer called Italo Calvino. You remember - Calvino is that guy Sam Vega recommended in the comments some time ago. Well Sam is sound and well-read, so maybe the post is worth reading. You are comfortable and you have the time...

“But,” you say to yourself, “I’m not reading Calvino, I’m reading AK’s take on Calvino and that’s not the same thing at all. AK may have downloaded the wrong book onto his Kindle. He may be writing about some other novel by someone else.” Even so, you read on.

It’s not that you expect anything in particular from this particular book. You’re the sort of person who, on principle, no longer expects anything of anything. There are plenty, younger than you or less young, who live in the expectation of extraordinary experiences: from books, from people, from journeys, from events, from what tomorrow has in store. But not you. You know that the best you can expect is to avoid the worst. This is the conclusion you have reached, in your personal life and also in general matters, even international affairs.

Now you wonder where that came from and what it means. Obviously it must be the prologue of Calvino’s book even though AK doesn’t say so directly. Maybe Calvino is preparing the reader for something different rather than the usual novel - or maybe it’s a hint about his technique. It isn’t clear.

No, you misunderstood. Lotaria wants to know the author’s position with regard to Trends of Contemporary Thought and Problems That Demand a Solution. To make your task easier she furnishes you with a list of names of Great Masters among whom you should situate him.

Again you feel the sensation you felt when the paper knife revealed the facing white pages. “I couldn’t say, exactly. You see, I’m not actually sure even of the title or the author’s name. Ludmilla will tell you about it: it’s a rather complicated story.”

“Ludmilla reads one novel after another, but she never clarifies the problems. It seems a big waste of time to me. Don’t you have this impression?”

An intriguing piece of writing, you realise that straight away. This guy Calvino may be poking fun at Derrida and deconstruction. His novel is described as postmodern by some pundits, but you already think that may be misleading. Pundits usually are – it’s their trade.

Ludmilla, now you are being read. Your body is being subjected to a systematic reading, through channels of tactile information, visual, olfactory, and not without some intervention of the taste buds. Hearing also has its role, alert to your gasps and your trills. It is not only the body that is, in you, the object of reading: the body matters insofar as it is part of a complex of elaborate elements, not all visible and not all present, but manifested in visible and present events: the clouding of your eyes, your laughing, the words you speak, your way of gathering and spreading your hair, your initiatives and your reticences, and all the signs that are on the frontier between you and usage and habits and memory and prehistory and fashion, all codes, all the poor alphabets by which one human being believes at certain moments that he is reading another human being.

Hmm – is that supposed to be sex? You hope not, but maybe Calvino is writing about the whole book-reading experience, the search for new angles on life which is after all what thoughtful readers do. They search for meaning – even in novels. Well you do that yourself - with some novels...

Meanwhile, in the satisfaction you receive from her way of reading you, from the textual quotations of your physical objectivity, you begin to harbour a doubt: that she is not reading you, single and whole as you are, but using you, using fragments of you detached from the context to construct for herself a ghostly partner, known to her alone, in the penumbra of her semiconsciousness, and what she is deciphering is this apocryphal visitor, not you.

“Yes,” you say to yourself, “I see that well enough. She and I may in a sense be reading each other, but the other we are reading isn’t the other we are to ourselves.... and so on.”

The lives of individuals of the human race form a constant plot, in which every attempt to isolate one piece of living that has a meaning separate from the rest—for example, the meeting of two people, which will become decisive for both—must bear in mind that each of the two brings with himself a texture of events, environments, other people, and that from the meeting, in turn, other stories will be derived which will break off from their common story

“It’s an entertaining novel about reading meanings,” AK buts in at this point. Were on earth has he been? Eating Marmite on toast probably - but better late than never.

“A novel with a complex plot interlaced with ten first chapters of ten imaginary novels,” AK intones as if reading the words from some other book, which may very well be the case.

“It does many things on many levels." he adds. "From poking fun at deconstruction to advising the reader to sit comfortably and shut out distractions before beginning to read.”

I have had the idea of writing a novel composed only of beginnings of novels. The protagonist could be a Reader who is continually interrupted. The Reader buys the new novel A by the author Z. But it is a defective copy, he can’t go beyond the beginning... He returns to the bookshop to have the volume exchanged...

I could write it all in the second person: you, Reader... I could also introduce a young lady, the Other Reader, and a counterfeiter-translator, and an old writer who keeps a diary like this diary...

"Is all this complexity worth my while?" you ask AK, pointedly tapping your watch in a literary sense.

“Of course it is,” AK says with a degree of confidence you don’t yet share, although you'll admit to being intrigued. “If you are new to Calvino, then you won’t have read anything like it before," he adds. "You’ll be entertained, provoked and encouraged to think from different angles.”

“Well,” you say to yourself, “I suppose that’s enough to give it a try.”

Invisible Cities

At the End of Five Days' Journey,
You Begin to Discover a Few Towns
Built Upon Rocky Heights
Nora Sturges

Prompted by Sam Vega’s reliable enthusiasm, I recently downloaded a copy of Invisible Cities onto my Kindle, a novel by Italian writer Italo Calvino.

It’s a short, lyrical novel, almost a prose poem really. A strange imaginary tour of fifty five imaginary cities, all with female names. The only characters are explorer Marco Polo and emperor Kublai Khan. Every now and then, interspersed between poetic descriptions of the cities, there are conversations between the two men. At first, because they do not speak the same language, Marco Polo has to describe the cities via an extempore sign language and whatever props come to hand.

There is no language without deceit.

However, the imaginary cities are not from Kublai Khan’s time, but a dreamlike mix of ancient and modern from the aroma of sandalwood fires and camel dung to aluminium towers and a strange city of exposed modern plumbing and one with no exterior from which you may never find your way out.

It’s a hotch potch of images, yet nothing is unknown to the reader. Calvino’s materials are our materials. In his cities he shows to us nothing we could not have built ourselves from our own imagination, our own materials.

Your footsteps follow not what is outside the eyes, but what is within, buried, erased. If, of two arcades, one continues to seem more joyous, it is because thirty years ago a girl went by there, with broad, embroidered sleeves, or else it is only because that arcade catches the light at a certain hour like that other arcade, you cannot recall where.

As a novel it’s all very odd, if wonderfully lyrical and poetically persuasive. It is divisive too, because judging by Amazon reviews, many readers don’t get on with the lack of a plot and the fact nothing actually happens.

What’s it about then?

I agree with Sam – it’s about memory. This eerie and quite haunting novel seems to offer the intriguing insight that the future is built from our memories of the past. In a sense, we remember the future as we encounter it and in so doing create new pasts and new futures. So past and future are both mutable. But touch them, cast them into words and we lose them. This is a theme of the novel, because Marco Polo has to cast his city tales into words for Kublai Khan - as does Calvino for us of course.

“Memory’s images, once they are fixed in words, are erased,” Polo said. “Perhaps I am afraid of losing Venice all at once, if I speak of it. Or perhaps, speaking of other cities, I have already lost it, little by little.”

Some possibilities within our memories are realised in the future, most are not and many never could be because they are dreams, mingled impressions, fancies and fantastical stories like those of Marco Polo.

But there is more, such as the impact of words and labels and the way these change memories and possibilities. The best way to bring all this out may well be lyrical prose, a release of the imagination where you can smell the leather bags of tobacco, the embers of a sandalwood fire, camel dung and a hint of exotic promise from high windows in sun-baked walls.

I thought: “You reach a moment in life when, among the people you have known, the dead outnumber the living. And the mind refuses to accept more faces, more expressions: on every new face you encounter, it prints old forms, for each one it finds the most suitable mask.”

It’s a book one should probably read more than once, because of course reading it changes things too – the past and the future.

And Polo said: “The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we live every day, that we form by being together. There are two ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the midst of the inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give them space.