The Road to San Giovanni

By Italo Calvino, Tim Parks (translator),

Book cover of The Road to San Giovanni

Book description

In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contracts, language and sensations associated with emptying the kitchen rubbish and the…

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Why read it?

1 author picked The Road to San Giovanni as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

Barney Norris

Author

Calvino, like Perec, was an experimental novelist, interested in imposing games and rules on what he created. Here, he took the convention of the short story collection and used it to dramatise the arrival of the twentieth century into rural Italy—the machine age, but also the fascist age, and the consuming fires of the Second World War. The incremental tension that comes from time passing is a powerful reading experience.

From Barney's list on collage novels.