Reviews for The Road to San Giovanni

The average rating for The Road to San Giovanni based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2015-07-04 00:00:00 Richard Atkinson The Road to San Giovanni 'The Road to San Giovanni' is a collection of five autobiographical essays- though it would be appropriate to call them 'memory deliberations' instead- which presents an affecting self-portrait and offers indirect insights into how Calvino conjured up his imaginary worlds- worlds which are surreal, mystical but so enthralling that they look real- whose language combines exactitude, freedom and lightness to form different voice altogether. Calvino starts with his relationship- which was not usual as his father was curious about the minute examination of flora, he had passion for studying and acclimatizing exotic plants, while Calvino used to weave his own world of fantasy-with father. "The way my father saw things, it was from here up that the world began, while the other part of the world below the house was a mere appendix, necessary sometimes when there were things to be, but alien and insignificant, to be crossed in great strides, as though in flight, without looking to right or left." Every other day Calvino walked to the farm with his father. Neither spoke, for the minds of both were elsewhere; the one already on the land, the other lost in the city. It was a struggle Calvino never really resolved: "Every morning of my life is still the morning when it's my turn to go with Father to San Giovanni." Second essay- A cinema goer's autobiography- is probably the best of all, Calvino meditates about his teens, surreptitiously attending movies. He often arrives late and leaves early. Calvino talks about influence of cinema on his life- Calvino created a unique world of his own in cinema which provided him a realm of imagination, he conjured up a space of new dimensions where he could relate the world in consciousness to something tangible. "A different world from the one around me, but my feeling was that only what I saw on the screen possessed the properties required of a world, the fullness, the necessity, the coherence, while away from the screen were only heterogeneous elements lumped together at random, the materials of a life, mine, which seemed to me utterly formless." The narrative gaps and transpositions which result inspire the distinctive style of his own works. Calvino- the soldier, fighting with the Italian partisans, has a comparable experience when he attempts to reconstruct a battle he had thought was a victory but which had in actuality been a defeat. To do so he uses signs to precisely invert the narrative. This third essay has a tragicomic tone, like the films of Calvino's admired contemporary, Federico Fellini whose influence can be seen in the works of Calvino as most of the works of Calvino are surreal, mystical, like a lucid dream. "The imagined memory is actually a real memory from that time because I am recovering things I first imagined back then. It wasn't the moment of Cardu'd death I saw, but afterwards, when our men had already left the village and one of the bersaglieri turns over a body on the ground and sees the reddish-brown moustache and the big chest torn open and says, 'Hey look who's dead.' and then everybody gathers round this dead man who instead of being the best of theirs had become the best of ours, Cardu who ever since he had left them had been in their thoughts, their conversation, their fears, their myths." The fourth essay is characterized by humor about 'La Poubelle'- the dustbin, Calvino talks about existential purpose of agreement- 'La Poubelle Agree' which, according to him, asserts existence of a man. "Thus daily representation of descent below ground, this domestic and municipal rubbish funeral, is meant first and foremost to put off my personal funeral, to postpone it if only for a little while, to confirm that for one more day I have been a producer of detritus and not detritus myself." The final essay describes possibility of a reconciliation specifically through the writer's relation to creative landscape. 'From the Opaque' in which the two extremes- opaque and the sunny- are deliberated. Calvino accepts that he is actually situated 'in the depths of the opaque' however he is attracted to 'sunny' and that, in writing, he is 'reconstructing the map of a sunniness that is only an unverifiable postulate for computation of the memory, the geometrical location of the ego. Italo Calvino

Review # 2 was written on 2019-06-15 00:00:00 Johnny Mills When it comes to Calvino, I'd always chose his innovative and magical fiction than anything non-fiction, but this book caught my eye, and I do like him a lot, so I took the plunge. These five pieces, or 'memory exercises' as so called, do offer some indirect insights into how he conjured up his imaginary stories. These writings were collected by his wife, and tell of his difficult relationship with his father, who was a farmer and horticulturist, and had a passion for studying and acclimatizing exotic wildlife which filled the young Calvino with an investigative mind. He also recalls his love for cinema, before a graphic account of fighting fascists during the Second World War, that becomes a sort of meditation on the role played by imagination in the human memory. There was one piece where he analysis living in a house in a Parisian suburb, which was good. The book overall was OK, but nowhere as good as the best of his fiction.