Marcovaldo

A poor city worker keeps seeking pockets of nature in modern urban life, with comic and sometimes disastrous results. Marcovaldo is poor, hopeful and unusually alert to the natural world. In the modern Italian city where he lives with his family, he searches for mushrooms, fresh air, moonlight, birds, fish, rest and small enchantments among streets, factories, neon and supermarkets. Each attempt turns comic, tender or disastrous. A cure becomes a problem, a picnic becomes a misadventure, a glimpse of beauty becomes another collision with modern life. Across twenty seasonal stories, Italo Calvino turns one working man’s hunger for nature into a series of sharp, playful fables about poverty, urban living and imagination. Marcovaldo is a classic short story cycle for readers looking for translated Italian fiction, literary comedy, social satire and magical everyday strangeness. Funny, melancholy and ingenious, it shows Calvino at his most accessible and quietly subversive. 'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer. 'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

A poor city worker keeps seeking pockets of nature in modern urban life, with comic and sometimes disastrous results. Marcovaldo is poor, hopeful and unusually alert to the natural world. In the modern Italian city where he lives with his family, he searches for mushrooms, fresh air, moonlight, birds, fish, rest and small enchantments among streets, factories, neon and supermarkets. Each attempt turns comic, tender or disastrous. A cure becomes a problem, a picnic becomes a misadventure, a glimpse of beauty becomes another collision with modern life. Across twenty seasonal stories, Italo Calvino turns one working man’s hunger for nature into a series of sharp, playful fables about poverty, urban living and imagination. Marcovaldo is a classic short story cycle for readers looking for translated Italian fiction, literary comedy, social satire and magical everyday strangeness. Funny, melancholy and ingenious, it shows Calvino at his most accessible and quietly subversive. 'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer. 'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times

A charming portrait of one man's dreams and schemes, by "the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century" ( Guardian ). In this enchanting book of linked stories, Italo Calvino charts the disastrous schemes of an Italian peasant, an unskilled worker in a drab northern industrial city in the 1950s and '60s, struggling to reconcile his old country habits with his current urban life. Marcovaldo has a practiced eye for spotting natural beauty and an unquenchable longing for the unspoiled rural world of his imagination. Much to the continuing puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams and gives rein to his fantasies, whether it's sleeping in the great outdoors on a park bench, following a stray cat, or trying to catch wasps. Unfortunately, the results are never quite what he anticipates. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1960s, the twenty stories in Marcovaldo are alternately comic and melancholy, farce and fantasy. Throughout, Calvino's unassuming masterpiece "conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life" ( New York Times ). Translated from the Italian by William Weaver.

A charming portrait of one man's dreams and schemes, by "the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century" ( Guardian ). In this enchanting book of linked stories, Italo Calvino charts the disastrous schemes of an Italian peasant, an unskilled worker in a drab northern industrial city in the 1950s and '60s, struggling to reconcile his old country habits with his current urban life. Marcovaldo has a practiced eye for spotting natural beauty and an unquenchable longing for the unspoiled rural world of his imagination. Much to the continuing puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams and gives rein to his fantasies, whether it's sleeping in the great outdoors on a park bench, following a stray cat, or trying to catch wasps. Unfortunately, the results are never quite what he anticipates. Spanning from the 1950s to the 1960s, the twenty stories in Marcovaldo are alternately comic and melancholy, farce and fantasy. Throughout, Calvino's unassuming masterpiece "conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life" ( New York Times ). Translated from the Italian by William Weaver.