The Road to San Giovanni

Do not expect unity, simplicity nor homogeneity in this collection of essays in this sadly final work by one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Compiled posthumously by the author's widow the book has five excellent reasons for reading. They are the five chapters.Chapter one, "The Road to San Giovanni" is a reminiscence of the author's relationship with his father and tonw. Chapter two, "A CinemaGoer's Autobiography" concerns itself with the author's youthful fascination with the movies, his perceptions of them his obsession with them and what I find most endearing, his love for American movies (it is worth at least books written by critics of that field). Chapter three, "Memories of a Battle" is a recollection of one of his wartime experiences. Chapter four, "La Poubelle Agreee" ruminates about taking out the trash in Paris. Chapter five "From the Opaque," is a Borges-like concoction concerning his place in the universe, using a mesmerizing array of mathematical, and geometrical ideas in a very experimental exercise.This book is unique becasue the first four of the chapters are complete in the sense that we do not feel the author would have gone further with them. The final one seems to be the most intriguing, not because it seems to be so obtuse (obtuse angle?), but rather a personal exercise by the author to develop this into a major work and as such, gives us an important glimpse into his creative genius.This collection is a curious oddity since it his last work and could be a primer for all his works. So if you have not read him, this may be a good starting point. If you are an afficiando of his works, this will enthrall you.

These essays were compiled posthumously and so it is not clear whether the final versions are as Calvino may have intended (though first four chapters are rather developed and likely would have published as is). Be that as it may, these generally provide great insight into Calvino the person, the thinker, the man behind the stories. In particular, Chapter 4 La Poubelle Agreee resonated with me as it is a clever discussion of the writing (and thinking) prcocess. Would have done 4 stars, but the recent Mariner imprints have flimsy covers unlike the old HBJ imprints, and are high susceptible to damage, tearing and creasing.

This collections starts off with a bang--the title essay BLEW ME AWAY. It was beautiful. Unfortunately, subsequent essays shrivled in it's shadow. I crapped out before finishing the whole book, second to last essay I think, the one about garbage. If you buy this, do yourself a favor--read it backwards. Probably the way it should have been organized in the first place. If you don't buy this book, do yourself a favor--find the title essay somewhere else.

People seem almost trapped in memory. Short of Allan Memorial-style brain erasure, can anyone really escape from their past after it becomes determined forever in the present? The confines and tolerance of our possibilities seem strangely intertwined with the framing and interpretation of our past experiences. Not only that, events that we can remember provide immediate access to momentary self-definition. What one did helps define and sometimes constrains what one may do or may not do. Choices, at least those allowed by the small dominion of human intentionality, help define our boundaries and memory can affect the variability and scope of those choices. In some ways, we are what we have chosen and memory provides a running commentary on the paths we have trodden. Along the way, things also happen to us, things perhaps unchosen and sometimes not remembered. Often, unremembered events impose greater influence upon our person than more vivid memories. So we seem to comprise the sum total of remembered and unremembered events along with choices made and not made relative to, and dependent upon, our inhabited space. As every present moment subtly flutters into a past moment, memory makes the running comprehension of contiguous moments possible, as though we balance on some vicarious unseen cognitive filmstrip with fully or partially filled frames stretching back into the muddy past and then extending forwards with an unknowable amount of empty frames awaiting imprint. Most of these frames fade quickly, never to return. Some fade only to a degree, or their colors and shapes evolve and morph, inviting inevitable reevaluation or stifling confusion. As age progresses, one may remember the different ways that one has engaged in the act of remembering through life, as the function of memory even appears to evolve over time. Where does this leave us? If our identities are largely based on collections of remembrances, what does this instability mean for self-identity? What about the accurate recall of events? What about the aspects of our lives that we never recall? Upon closer inspection and analysis, our personal self constructions begin to sag and wilt under heavy questions. We rely on often unreliable memory to provide grounding and context. Do we really have any? Unreliable memory may call seemingly reliable memory into question. An almost unresolvable tension remains in the juxtaposition between the two.Italo Calvino, arguably one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century, took on many messy questions swirling around memory in five short pieces published posthumously as "The Road to San Giovanni." His widow, Esther, opens this collection with a single page preface describing the stories inside as "memory exercises," apparently once destined for a longer work with a working title of "Passaggi obbligati." Some acknowledge the limitations of memory, with past events bounded sometimes by sounds, sights or even by geography. Some search for the origins or underlying motivations in action, as though contained by a universal collective memory that all of our singular remembrances interface with for referencing and framing within larger unspoken cultural themes. Some merely describe and strain at the confines of human faculties. The entire exercise suggests that human memory often remains as wispy, uncertain and ineffable as the nebulous future. We don't really know where we're going and perhaps we don't even completely comprehend where we've come from? Perhaps the entire act of recall infers doubt? As always, Calvino inspires thought.The title piece opens with "a general explanation of the world and of history," meaning the confines of experience within physical landmarks and the collective experiences of the entities enclosed within those boundaries. Husserlian phenomenology posits a "framing" or "bracketing" of the world, or the removal of distracting ancillary facts and features that can clog up the comprehension of one's subjective experience. In other words, one must filter to understand. Calvino appears to attempt a similar bracketing by examining a period of his childhood spent on his father's estate in San Remo. This defines the world as such. One road leads to town, presumably Calvino's future with theaters, beaches inhabited by girls with "smooth arms," buildings, roads and goods. The other road leads to San Giovanni, a farm frozen in an agricultural epoch preferred by his father. These paths also symbolize the split between his father's lifestyle and the one Calvino himself desired. The memory stretches back to the late 1920s, so many of the structures he reflects upon are now "gone forever." He recalls elements, such as sounds, "more sensed than heard or seen." He exaggerates his father's calling out the Latin names of plants: "Ypotolglaxia jasminifolia, Photophila wolfoides." He claims to have never learned the real names himself, another symptom of the chasm between father and son. Before the war, the family grew plenty of food in their estate, enough for his mother to worry about waste: the "waste of self set against the waste of the world in general." All of his father's employees knew him at the estate. In contrast, the city provided a thick veil of anonymity to escape into and become "a consumer and victim of industrial products." A city and an estate bounded these memories and defined the world of this phase of Calvino's formative years. He moved on."A Cinema-Goer's Autobiography" relates Calvino's experience with small-town Italian cinema between 1936 and the war. Dubbed American films usually topped the bill, apparently worth skipping out of studying for, despite the looming wrath of his "restraining" mother. For the same reason that how people lie says just as much about them as how they tell the truth, he found the idealistic portrayal of America through Hollywood films revealing. Viviane Romance cinematically embodied "a living woman and erotic fantasy," while shimmering black and white film transformed Marlene Dietrich into "desire itself." The strong female characters in American film apparently provided an example for Italian women in the provinces, though they also represented "an Olympus of unattainable women." These objects of desire came with pros and cons, as they didn't allow one "to settle," but they also discouraged the discovery of different kinds of beauty. A wartime economic embargo on American films eventually stopped the flood of Americana, but it opened the way for Italian cinema. He calls the censorship of American film the first time a right had been taken from him. The periodic way he saw some movies also revealed the intriguing nature of memory. Leaving and arriving in the middle of a film fragmented the experience, but he could always return and pick up where he left off, sometimes decades later. The piece ends with an appreciation of the work of Federico Fellini, who apparently inspired Calvino to write this autobiography.A more indeterminate memory haunts the third piece, "Memories of a Battle," in which Calvino tries to retell the story of a skirmish against the fascists during World War II. Here "the uncertainty of the memory reflects the uncertainty of the event." As the battle unfolds, details vaporize. How did they cut the phone wires without pincers? A woman's glance appears to still linger in memory, but the frustration mounts until he states "I don't know if I'm destroying the past or saving it." The fascists ended up winning, as the group realized when they heard their bellowed victory song, so there he sat, abandoned in enemy territory. People died. Soon after, the memory ends. The piece reads like watching random yet subtlety related film clips flashed somewhat out of sequence. Here memory comes firmly into question.No one will think of their trash in the same way after reading "La Poubelle Agréée." Calvino dives head first into the politico-social aspects of waste in this irresistible essay, which compares the taking out of trash bins to rites of purification with "satisfaction analogous to defecation." A comfort, and also an illusion, that emptying the rubbish wards off death, or the inevitable becoming of rubbish oneself. The vital dependency of civilization on continually removing rubbish contradicts the abject neglect of rubbish workers. "Those who empty poubelles see that which is denied them," but envy begets promise. "A pariah will eventually become a member of consumer society and thus a producer of refuse." The relentless lifting and emptying parallels the desire for the traditional agricultural process, in which "nothing was lost," but "what was buried sprouts up again from the earth." Then the story takes a turn to the kitchen and the role of women, who then rebelled against their roles of domestic servitude with cooking as a symbol of oppression. Calvino claims that he tries to help out the women of the house in the kitchen, but they perpetually ban him due to incompetence. Even his own young daughter excoriates his culinary ineptitude. So he consoled himself with "running errands," which he feels he excels at. He reveals that it has taken him 3 - 4 years to complete these reflections on garbage or "the garbagio," or 1974 - 1976 as the piece's final page shows. We're "always assuming that our own times themselves don't end."The final piece, "From the Opaque," defies description, but it appears to involve a frustrated attempt at describing the world. Exhausting run on sentences, some not ending and some not really beginning, exude a feeling of overwhelming helplessness, a literary analysis paralysis in which the teller seems stultified. One can apparently go mad while describing the world in all of its totality. It appears to represent an experiment with the limitations of language. Can a mere human vocabulary even encompass and contain the world? It seems doubtful. And if we can't grasp the world syntactically, where does that leave our place in it? And consequently ourselves? One could potentially babble on for hours upon hours.Though incomplete, "The Road to San Giovanni" contains some extraordinary writing. Calvino had a way of almost peering at the reader through the lines of text, knowing what to expect and how to draw out curiosities and introspections. At his very best, he can fill a reader with wonder about the world while simultaneously extracting disturbing questions about it. These particular pieces may gnaw at one's confidence in the capacity of memory and its ability to deliver past worlds up to our present selves. Though he seems to remember plenty of his previous experiences, "Memories of a Battle" throws a cog into the works and invites skepticism about the human ability to recall anything accurately. "La Poubelle Agréée" mentions the passing of time and the changes wrought by its progression. In a sense, our memories grow with us. They remain vivid but maturity and the collision of other experiences past and present often reframe and reshape them, sometimes into something else that fits more conveniently with a current and immediate conception of self. Perhaps our memories merely meet our present psychic needs rather than providing us with an impervious narrative thread of causality leading back to the origin of sense. Memories also seem subject to time and age, just like flesh, roads, buildings and cities, so what does that imply about their ability to serve as the foundation of identity? Calvino's work can make one look deep into the firmament of things often taken for granted. "The Road to San Giovanni" inspires such reflection.