That doesn’t really bother me too much, but at the same time I’m aware I’m no expert on this book. Some of the stories connect with me more than others. At the very end is an afterword by the author that is a delightful treat for those of us who, like Palomar, seek reductive laws in the chaotic universe around us. The earlier ones are easier to read as short narrative stories the later ones are closer to meditations on existence. Some vignettes are hilarious ( The Naked Bosom), others are delicate and clever ( The blackbird’s whistle), others are earnest and descriptive of Mr Palomar’s conceptual experiments ( The world looks at the world). He is trying to apply to the universe everything he has thought about the lawn. Palomar’s mind has wandered, he has stopped pulling up weeds he no longer thinks of the lawn: he thinks of the universe. In all of them, mundane parts of life quickly get extrapolated to bigger speculations about the universe and everything – but mostly in a way that leaves Mr Palomar with less certainty about anything than when he started. In one he’s looking at waves, in another he’s in a queue to buy cheese, in another he’s looking at a zen garden in Japan. This is a book of 27 very short stories, all moments in Mr Palomar’s life. We could compare experiences, Mr Palomar and me. When packing for our Japan holiday I remembered Mr Palomar visits the Ryoanji garden in Kyoto, so I added the book to my bag to re-read once we’d been there, too. But I was so relieved to read it and have Mr Palomar effectively tell me ‘You Are Not Alone’ that I sucked the book straight into my soul and have held it as something precious ever since. What I just took for a (long-awaited) portrayal of universal human experience is, in fact, a portrayal of the exact type of introverted, neurotic, overly-analytical, cripplingly-intellectualising person I happen to be myself. What really happens is this: he describes exactly what it’s like to be a person just like me. Of course, that’s not actually what he does. Best of all, though, through characters like Mr Palomar, he did something I never found in other authors: he described exactly what it’s like to be a real human being. He could twist a story in self-referential knots like a Moebius strip, or be breathtakingly imaginative and poetic, or seem to think in entirely new ways. When I read my first Calvino novel (back in my first year of uni) I felt like I’d discovered a best friend and an envelope-pushing playful-trickster Michel-Gondry-type genius all at once. ‘I never got into it,’ or ‘It was strange,’ or ‘I suppose it just isn’t my thing.’ This was incomprehensible to me. Many times I’ve loaned out his books (sometimes I’ve found a copy in a second hand shop and just bought it for the person I was with, then and there: Read This) and inevitably I end up with a lukewarm response. Recently I’ve discovered that not everyone agrees. This seems to me to be the most obvious and wonderful thing in the world: that Italo Calvino is a fantastic genius and his books are extraordinary, universally enjoyable experiences. Finally it is not “the waves” that he means to look at, but just one individual wave: in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object. He is not contemplating, because for contemplation you need the right temperament, the right mood, and the right combination of exterior circumstances and though Mr Palomar has nothing against contemplation in principle, none of these three conditions applies to him. He is not lost, because he is quite aware of what he is doing: he wants to look at a wave and he is looking at it. Not that he is lost in contemplation of the waves. Mr Palomar is standing on the shore, looking at a wave. The sea is barely wrinkled, and little waves strike the sandy shore.
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