Into the War
Italo Calvino
Language: English
Pages: 128
ISBN: 0544146387
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino’s memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini’s army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades. The callow narrator of these tales observes the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War is one of Calvino’s only works of autobiographical fiction. It offers both a glimpse of this writer’s extraordinary life and a distilled dram of his wry, ingenious literary voice.
“All three stories attest to the potentially magical, transformative space of adolescence . . . The seeds of the later Calvino — the fabulist who worked profound moral and ethical points into his narratives — are all here.” — Joseph Luzzi, Times Literary Supplement
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Duce.’ In an open-top car, beside some generals, and wearing the uniform of an army marshal, was Mussolini. He was going to inspect the front. He looked around and, since people were staring at him in astonishment, he raised his hand, smiled, and signalled that they could applaud him. But the car was going fast; he had disappeared. I had barely seen him. What struck me was how young he was: a boy, he seemed, just a boy, as fit as a fiddle, with that shaved neck, his skin taut and tanned,.
Marines, when I saw them the next morning, filing by in the garden, thin, lanky youths, with a lazy step that was indifferent to orders, while Captain Bizantini inspected our arms as we lined up on parade. When we protested about their behaviour the night before, Bizantini added his own recriminations; he shared our local animosity, out of hierarchical rivalry with those in the Young Fascist movement from the main town, and started to say: ‘Yes, you see, a fine example of young sailors.
What about you, what did you take?’ they asked me. Assembly was in a pavilion that had previously been an English club, but was now transformed into the Fascist Club. In its corridors illuminated by chandeliers it was like a fair: everyone was showing and boasting about his booty, without fear of their superiors any more, and was plotting the best way of hiding it so as not to be too noticeable on returning to Italy. Bergamini made the tennis racquet disappear into the baggy part of his.
Going to phone to check up. Naturally, we instantly thought that we could also go out together if we squared it with those in charge, and that we could use the telephone in the early hours of the morning primarily to play tricks on people we knew. But, however much we said ‘We’ll do this and that! You’ll see what fun we’ll have!’, and however much we felt we had planned and anticipated everything imaginable in the days leading up to that Friday, nevertheless I expected something more from that.
Torch, while bats and moths fly round her and toads scamper from beneath her feet, so, when they arrive at the city boundary, the narrator fears she will mount on a broomstick and fly over the town. The poetic tone emerges later, in some of the nocturnal descriptions. Night is a strong theme in all three tales, but the last story, set entirely in the hours of darkness, is almost a hymn to night, in which the narrator wants to wrap himself. It is also a nocturnal tour of San Remo: from the.