Tundraco's Daily Living Guide to Book Reviews
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Tundraco's Daily Living Guide to Book Reviews |
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The Path to the Spiders' Nests Revised Edition By Italo Calvino Harper Perennial (2000) ISBN 10: 0060956585 ISBN 13: 978-0060956585 |
Reviewed by Israel Drazin - February 9, 2010
This is the first novel by the famed Italian writer Italo Calvino (1923-1985) who composed it at age 23. It tells about the Italian Resistance against the Nazis during World War II.
Calvino introduces the novel with a 1964 preface in which he attempts to explain what prompted him to write the novel: the emotions created by the end of the war, the desire to describe the resistance movement and a need to defend the resistance. Yet, Calvino admits that he has not succeeded. He does not state why. Instead he gives a montage of different reasons that leave the reader confused. In fact he admits that he himself is confused why he wrote it as he did. "The pages," he writes, "stand there in their impudent permanence which I know to be deceptive, pages which even then 9when they were written) were at variance with a memory which was still a living presence…these pages are no use to me."
What is wrong with the novel? It won a prize when it was written. It is very readable and flows well, except for several pages in which Calvino sidesteps from his story and describes the motivations of the resistance fighters.
Readers will have to make up their own minds. But it seems that in hind sight, Calvino would have preferred to write a straight-forward tale about the resistance. Instead, he wrote a story about a very young boy, whose sister was a prostitute who slept with Germans, who found himself among a band of incompetent resistance fighters, who he can't really understand. It is humorous, but it was not the book he wanted to write.
Dr. Israel Drazin is the author of fifteen books, including a series of five volumes on the Aramaic translation of the Hebrew Bible, which he co-authors with Rabbi Dr. Stanley M. Wagner, and a series of four books on the twelfth century philosopher Moses Maimonides, the latest being Maimonides: Reason Above All, published by Gefen Publishing House, www.gefenpublishing.com. The Orthodox Union (OU) publishes daily samples of the Targum books on www.ouradio.org
