Marcovaldo
Ratings6
Average rating4.3
15
Ratings6
Average rating4.3
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.
Reviews with the most likes.
I don't know what I was expecting, but I wasn't expecting this: a story where anything can happen to anybody at any time. It's a story with a contemporary feel, a story of modern excess, a story of angst, story of fear of consequences. Our main character is the same in every story, but he could be any poor working man in a modern city, blamed for things that occur outside of his control, suffering for the things he does which are not really any different from anyone else, living a small desperate life in a heartless world. It sounds sad but it isn't; it strikes me as some sort of a comedic tragedy. And somehow someone thinks it's a story for children.
