Into the War

This book is difficult to describe in terms of its form. As pointed out in the introduction, is began as three separate stories, then was combined by Calvino into a novella, and extensively edited by him. As a result it is an unsatisfying but interesting piece only by virtue of the fact that it is Calvino's early work.The story line is simple and disjointed as it tells the story of the young Calvino and his friend and their experiences during a brief period in northern Italy at the beginning of the second world war. While I found most of the book unsatisfying, as pointed out in the introduction, the few short sections about his father are really a eulogy and apology to him for their distance. That is why the book is of interest for the fans of Calvino. You won't find any treed barons or cloven knights here. This illustrates that early in his career, Calvino was struggling to find his own wayI would therefore caution the reader who is approaching Calvino for the first time to pass over this book and begin with his more mature works or you will find that you are merely whipping up a storm that will blind you and you won't be able to see his world through this book as has happened to others.For Calvino aficionados, students or those interested in seeing how a major talent develops, this book will prove to be rewarding.

Italo Calvino is much better known for his fiction works; his magical realism, if we’re calling it that, is exquisite and astounding literature, even translated. I can imagine the Italian is even better, but the works I’ve read by him still have a flow and a style all his own, across multiple translators and editions.The neat thing about this is that it’s one of the few [compared to the number of fiction works he put out] nonfiction collections he wrote. It’s just three essays about his boyhood years, at that strange age between sixteen and eighteen where your priorities are screwy and you think you know better than anyone else around you - all that honesty is there, but compounded with the fact that when he was that age, Italy had just joined World War Two.So Into The War has some really fascinating first hand accounts of him hanging out on a beech with his childhood best friend and then oh dang, there goes Mussolini in his fancy car. Towards the end of the book [which I believe takes place a year or two after the start, or is perhaps written from such a later point in his life that the politics of his later years shine through, i’m not sure] you start seeing those cracks form in his belief in fascism. I’m not convinced he was ever a Nazi sympathiser or anything, but I don’t know him as a person intimately. Still, it’s interesting to see him play out these tales of youth - of a ‘Boy’s Day Out’, guys out of school and just screwing around - in the belly of a gutted, abandoned, war-torn town. It reads like both a nostalgic love letter to his home town and the time before the war as much as anything else, and i think it’s poignant and insightful and truly well written.

This is a slim, slim volume, only 91 pages of text, plus excellent introductions by Martin McLaughlin, the smooth translator, and by Calvino himself. But it makes available in English a trio of quasi-autobiographical stories, published in Italian in 1954, that show a very different side of Calvino from the post-modern trickster of books like  IF ON A WINTER'S NIGHT A TRAVELER . Besides giving a very down-to-earth view of provincial life in a country newly at war, they are filled with the charm of youth -- or rather the insecure adolescent reaching for new experience but forming essential moral values at the same time.Italy entered the Second World War on June 10, 1940. At this time, Calvino was 16, at high school in the resort town of San Remo. As required under the Fascist government, he was also a member of the paramilitary youth organization, the Avanguardisti, and so was roped into various duties under the new emergency. In the first of the three stories, he is involved with assisting refugees who have been relocated from the mountain areas of potential conflict; it is his first close contact with the peasant classes, and one that obviously affects him. In the second story, he goes with his group to nearby Menton on the French Riviera, which has fallen into Italian hands. While his comrades loot the abandoned houses, he himself is more interested in the stories told by the empty rooms and scattered personal effects. The third story shows him with a friend on their weekly duty as air-raid wardens. Leaving their post, the boys plan to lose their virginity, but in the process Calvino makes some important discoveries about his friend and himself.So not war, hardly even the fringes of war, but a formative period nonetheless. Calvino (the real Calvino) would remain too young to be enlisted in the Fascist armies. When he did join the war, it was to fight on the other side, as a partisan.