The Watcher and Other Stories (Harbrace Paperbound Library)

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The longest story, “Cockfighter,” is an astonishing coming-of-ager about feisty Ladda, 15, who watches as her father, once the best cockfighter in town, loses his status, money, and dignity to Little Jui, 16, a meth addict whose father is the local crime boss. To reach the polls where he was to act as an election watcher, Amerigo followed a series of narrow, arcaded streets, still paved with old cobblestones, along the walls of humble buildings, densely inhabited, no doubt, but still without any sign of life on that Sunday at dawn. Scene with elderly peasant father sharing almonds with his brain-damaged son is a microcosm of the story's quietly moving tone. He didn’t want to succumb to the room’s squalor, and to avoid that he concentrated on the squalor of their electoral equipment—that stationery, those files, the little official book of regulations which the chairman consulted at the slightest doubt, and he was already nervous before they began—because, for Amerigo, this squalor was rich, rich in signs, in meanings, perhaps even contradictions. Watcher, on the other hand I could not get into at all and it felt dated and lacks the entertaining farcical tone of the other two stories.

It depicts a day in the life of Amerigo Ormea, a dedicated Italian Communist, who acts as a poll watcher at a special elec tion station inside the walls of the Cottolengo Hospital for In curables, a city within the city of Turin.In Il Barone Rampante (Baron in the Trees, 1957), a boy takes to the trees to avoid eating snail soup and lives an entire, fulfilled life without ever coming back down. Maybe the most moving piece here is "On The Rainy River," about a draftee's ambivalence about going, and how he decided to go: "I would go to war—I would kill and maybe die—because I was embarrassed not to. A bright, fine copy in near fine dustjacket with a tiny scar to the front panel and mild wear to the spine panel.

But the couple in the last story are rather nice, especially since everybody has had this sort of harrowing situation. Dust jacket condition: wear at the top and bottom at the spine, also at the top flap crease; creasing and wear at the front cover top - please see photos. It's much darker in tone than typical Calvino story -- at least ones in Difficult Loves and Marcovaldo -- but retains the quintessential Calvino compassion and humanity. There, around him, were the other officials, commonplace people, most of them (it seemed to him) mustered on the recommendation of Catholic Action but some (besides himself) from the Communist and Socialist parties (he still hadn’t distinguished them), performing a common task, a rational, secular service.The last story, "The Argentinian Ant," again examines a phenomenon dealing with the powers and principalities of a sacrosanct establishment — in this case a giant, destructive horde of ants, fed mindlessly by a government agent. Calvino makes parallels of the voting act with a religious rite and leaves us with the feeling of “…. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. Amerigo didn’t seek the limelight; in his profession, he preferred to remain the right man in the right place, not pushing himself forward. There are places of temporary respite, like the beach, but the problems will be waiting for you when you come back.