Marcovaldo
Italo Calvino
14 €
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Coup de coeur
(Fiction), by Amanda
A delightful collection of short stories, Marcovaldo recounts the urban misadventures of the title character, a working-class labourer with a large family who dreams of escaping his industrial city life for a freer, healthier life in the great outdoors. The shenanigans that ensue, the sincerity of the protagonist, and the irony with which Calvino infuses each episode will make you laugh without making you despair. In spite of poisonous sidewalk mushrooms, disease-carrying lab rabbits, and fishing trips in polluted water, Marcovaldo never wavers in his quest, a Don Quixote for the modern era of city-dwellers if ever there was one.
Marcovaldo is an enchanting collection of twenty stories that are both melancholy and funny, farce and fantasy. Calvino charts the struggles of an Italian peasant to reconcile country habits with urban life, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider. As always with Calvino, nothing is quite as it seems.
'Delightful and rewarding as always' Observer
'The most magically ingenious of the contemporary Italian novelists' The Times
Translated by William Weaver
Publisher: Vintage Publishing
Binding: Paperback
Publication date: 22 Mar 2001
Dimensions: 198 x 129 x 10 mm
ISBN: 9780099428541
