The Watcher and Other Stories

Italo Calvino's specialty was magical realism -- treeborne nobility, tarot stories, and noblemen chopped in half. But "The Watcher and Other Stories" displays his talents in grittier, more hopeless stories and characters. The title story involves Amerigo, a rather naive young Communist who is employed as a "Watcher" at a hospital; he keeps an eye on the patients to make sure they are all aware enough to vote. (He spends most of his spare time feuding with his pregnant girlfriend) As he watches during the voting time, the nuns bring by people who are mentally retarded, deformed, horribly ill, or all three. Some make the best of their dreary lives (like the handless man), and some aren't aware enough to. And what he sees changes Amerigo's way of thinking. "Smog" is about a pitiful young man who arrives in the city, and immediately becomes pathologically freaked out by all the smog, dust and grime. Even when his elegant celebrity girlfriend spends weekends with him, he can't think about anything except the dust. And finally, "The Argentine Ant" has a young couple and baby arriving in a country cottage -- only to get invaded by ants that evening. They try desperately to eradicate the pests (which are in every house in the area) but the ants may have an unlikely ally. Compared to Calvino's warm, slightly surreal stories, "The Watcher and Other Stories" seems like a rather bleak book, without any solid endings to the storylines. The first two are simply dark and a bit depressing, more in the vein of his "Path to the Spiders' Nests," while the third is just tragicomic. But Calvino's rich, slightly dreamlike writing style is very much intact here, and the more optimistic tone can be found in the socialite, who sees beauty where her boyfriend sees only squalor. And while the descriptions of the sick, deformed and mentally retarded are disturbing, they're also quite sad -- Calvino never forgets that these are all people, who need love, and who were simply unluckier than most. The main characters vary a lot -- Amerigo is naively Communistic, and rather irresponsible, while the "Smog" guy is rather stagnant (and clearly has OCD as well). But the couple in the last story are rather nice, especially since everybody has had this sort of harrowing situation. "The Watcher And Other Stories" is a look at Calvino's darker, more meditative stories. This is realism, not magical realism.

The Watcher and Other Stories is a collection of three different but thematically interlinked stories. I personally thought that the title story was the most intriguing. The Watcher deals with our protagonist "watching" the voting procedures in a home for invalids/deranged/etc. The home is a mini city and becomes a type of microcosm of Italian society. Smog deals again with the futility of human life through pollution. The Argentine Ants is a type of mock horror story. All of the above are extremely well written and executed. Although I did enjoy this book, I would suggest that readers unfamiliar with Calvino try some of his masterpieces first, and then move onto the minutiae of works such as these.

The three long stories that comprise this book at first appear to have been slapped together without much concern for whether they work well with one another. Not only were they written at different points in Calvino's career -- "The Watcher" is from 1963, "Smog" from 1958 and "The Argentine Ant" from 1952, but they don't even get the continuity that a single translator might have been able to provide. That's why it's so surprising that a common theme in these works emerges anyway -- namely, that existence is futile and farcical and yet also must be cherished because, in the end, what else is there? The protagonists of these stories are all seeking ways to somehow make the futility bearable or even meaningful. "The Watcher" portrays Amerigo Ormea, an election observer assigned to a polling place that is actually a mental institution. Amerigo's long-held political convictions are, if not wavering, then at least punch-drunk from having been slapped around so much. The momentous changes once foreseen by him have not materialized, and as a result he is trying to believe that change is a gradual and even mundane process, a matter of "doing as much as you could, day by day." Calvino uses the asylum and its inhabitants a metaphor for democratic society and its odd creatures. In doing so he displays a keen talent for showing up grand arguments like whether democracy is viable for the absurd squabbles they may be at their core -- like whether a ballot sheet has been properly folded, or whether an armless man's vote counts if someone has to go into the voting booth with him. Amerigo struggles to accept that such grotesque banality is the very stuff of democracy. This struggle is sometimes involving and insightful and sometimes not. The force of the story is somewhat blunted by too many philosophical musings on Calvino's part. He may mean to send up the diehard's tendency toward philosophical musings, but they are droning and often repetitive and not particularly exciting to read. Nevertheless, "The Watcher" has a lot to offer. In the other two stories, the main characters also must persevere in the face of circumstances they cannot control. "Smog" demonstrates an acute awareness of environmental peril that seems somewhat ahead of its time. But as in "The Watcher," Calvino's chief concern is how humanity copes. The main character has just moved to the city and is overwhelmed by its filth. He washes his hands compulsively as he observes how the urbanites deal with a dirty fog that is intensifying its grip on the city. One man simply makes the filth a part of himself, living and breathing it with hardly a thought. Another, a factory owner and the worst polluter in the city, tries to redeem himself by funding "The Institute for the Purification of the Urban Atmosphere in Industrial Centers." A worker in one of his factories "didn't try to evade all the smoky gray around us, but to transf