A Review of Italo Calvino’s “Last Comes the Raven”
The Fabulist?
I used to be a fan of the works of Jonathan Lethem (I won’t go into what made me stop being a fan in this review as it is too heartbreaking a story on my part), and I knew that a big influence on the works of Lethem was an Italian writer named Italo Calvino (1923–1985). Calvino is said to be an early fabulist — a writer of stories that have magic realism elements to them — but if you’re looking for that in this collection of short stories, Last Comes the Raven, you’re going to walk away empty-handed. Truth be known, Calvino had his hand in more realist stories, and this collection of early writings is more a look at the ludicrousness of war, being set in World War II and post-war Italy. In a way, Calvino’s writing in this collection could be said to be neo-realist, to borrow from the Italian film genre that was popular immediately after the war. However, there’s a big problem with many of these tales in that they are shaggy dog stories that go nowhere. They run on, and then they end on a dime. With or without a punchline.
The best stories in Last Comes the Raven are the ones that slyly look at the human condition in detail. The first story in this collection is a piece about a young man who “gifts” a servant girl around his age with insects and toads from the garden outside of the home she’s serving in. At the end of the story, all of the animals have joined the girl inside the room where she’s to wash dishes. It’s a tale about longing in a sense, about wanting to gift parts of yourself in an animalistic way to someone else and join them in their toils. There’s another great story in this collection about a bunch of burglars who break into a pastry shop and one of the burglars can’t help but eating the baked goods rather than grabbing what’s in the till and running. It’s a piece about the gluttony of theft, and it is humourous. As a story, it works — it’s entertaining, at least. Some stories may make you feel uncomfortable. There’s a tale in here about a soldier going on leave who is sitting aside a sleeping widow coming back from her husband’s funeral in a train passenger car, and the soldier uses the opportunity to kind of sexually assault the poor woman by secretly placing his hands on her body in slow, halting ways at convenient times (ie. when they enter a tunnel). It’s an unsettling story, one that cuts a little too close to the truth of the unchecked desires of young men.
However, most stories in Last Comes the Raven don’t hit the mark and are simply unmemorable. This is a collection that is only now being published in full as an English translation (though some of the stories have been already translated and been published elsewhere, such as in The Paris Review). It shows. One story has a man in conversation with his wife about all the clothes he’d like to buy his children for confirmation in the church, and when the wife inquires if he was going to sell some of their few assets to be able to properly dress their children, the man replies, “Never.” End of story. Am I missing something? Many of the stories are like that. However, some stories do have the hallmarks of someone who would come to flit with magic realism. There’s a story about a man who uses a mine that’s washed ashore from the sea for fishing. So there’s that — a kind of playfulness that someone would use to later go on to write stories that tiptoe into the fantastic and unreal.
It’s just such a shame, though, that it’s the war stories in this collection that are truly meaningless. There’s one great story about a man being led into a dark forest by a soldier and asking if he’s going to be shot for treason, only to be told that they are going to headquarters to see if he can be set free — but is this soldier telling the truth or lying? (There’s naturally a tension to this story that makes it compulsively readable.) However, the problem with a lot of these tales is that you have to know something of Italian history and the sides that presented themselves in the war in Italy in the 1940s to make sense of them. The odd use of a footnote here or there to explain things doesn’t do much justice to these tales. It’s a shame because I do generally get where Calvino is going in this collection: showing that war is just incomprehensible, even if it can be treated as just a fact of everyday life for those living it. Still, a lot of the tales are just shambles that don’t properly introduce characters or locales. At least, the good news is that most of them are fairly short.
Put this another way: Last Came the Raven is probably not the best introduction to the works of Italo Calvino. And, to be honest, since it’s taken me this long to get around to reading Calvino despite the strong connection that he has to both Lethem and fantasy literature, I’m not really sure where to begin. However, since this book doesn’t make the case for Calvino as a magic realist, and some of the stories are just subpar as far as literary fiction goes, this is probably a collection for the die-hard fan who must have everything that the author wrote. In any event, Last Came the Raven didn’t satisfy any lingering desire to read those who influenced someone who used to be my favourite author. It’s too bad. Maybe what the publisher could have done, if it had the rights to do so, was simply republish the author’s best work in a new collection. That way, you’d be able to see why Italo Calvino is such a revered literary figure in both the literary and fantasy genres. As far as Last Comes the Raven is concerned, aside from a decent story here and there, this is probably last in the works of a great author that you should probably read. It’s really a disappointing work from a genius author.
Italo Calvino’s Last Comes the Raven will be published by Mariner Books on June 15, 2021.
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Get in touch: zacharyhoule@rogers.com
