THE PATH TO THE SPIDERS' NESTS

By Italo Calvino

The Ecco Press

$23, 185 pp.

The best proof of the inherent eccentricity of existence--this week's best proof, anyway--is that Italo Calvino, revered author of If on a winter's night a traveler and other classics of post-modern literature, began by writing neo-realistic stories of the Italian Resistance. In the recently retranslated and re-released The Path to the Spiders' Nests, Calvino tells the story of Pin, a street urchin. Pin, mischievous and impish and all those other cute things we expect of urchins, lives a difficult life. (This too we expect, although Pin's life has cruder aspects than most.)

Nominally a cobbler's apprentice, his master is in jail so often that Pin never works. His older sister is a prostitute whose most frequent customer is a German soldier. This makes her an unpopular figure in certain quarters of Italy during World War II. Pin sleeps in the same room that his sister conducts her business in, and so is precociously knowledgeable about sex. He unhesitatingly shares this with peers, who are fascinated, but find him too different to befriend. Shunned, Pin hangs around a bar and tries to entertain the adults with bawdy songs and neighborhood gossip, rewarded occasionally with wine and cigarettes. Trying to please the bar's denizens, he steals the German soldier's pistol. Thus begins Pin's involvement with the Resistance; after a couple misadventures, he finds himself assistant cook for a unit made up entirely of men kicked out other units, where he spends most of the novel.

This is not a promising premise for a book. Too many things can go wrong: Depending on how the author wishes to remember his or her childhood, the book can become either morbidly depressing or Disney-fied; the antics of a kooky bunch of losers in the army can rapidly degenerate into irritating mugging; coming-of-age stories are often excruciating excursions into nostalgia for a past and innocence that doubtless never existed.

Calvino does his best to avoid these traps and usually succeeds. I am pleased to note, for example, that Pin learns nothing in the course of the novel. In writing about Calvino upon his death in 1985, Gore Vidal said, "He looks; he describes; he has a scientist's respect for data (the opposite of the surrealist or fantasist)." He is here absolutely right; nothing that happens is unbelievable (although a prison escape strains credulity), but it is all quite weird and foreign to a life lived outside of wartime.

Although Calvino's book is influenced by the neo-realist movement which dominated Italian post-war culture, the novel nonetheless has an air of surreality. It often seems like a fable because so much is presented to the reader through the eyes of an eight year old, precocious in some ways and naive in most, as all eight year olds are.

At about 150 pages, the book is almost a novella and thus is supplemented with a lovely preface by Calvino himself, written in 1964. Calvino's later and better-known novels were neither warm nor autobiographical (with the exception of his final novel, the distanced and pensive Mr. Palomar), so it is somewhat surprising to find Calvino reflective and downright chatty. Nests was originally published in 1947 when Calvino was twenty-three; writing in 1964, Calvino was twenty-three; writing in 1964, Calvinoapparently felt the 17 years in between had earnedhim the seniority which marks his attitude in thepreface, even though he would not write the booksthat made him world-famous until much later.

In the preface, Calvino also discusses his ownexperiences fighting in the Resistance andthoughtfully examines his relationship to the bookas a whole and to Pin in particular. He writesabout his influences; he talks about his politicaland literary ideals. He is not altogether honesthere, however; although he gently rebukes hisyouthful self for his politics, he fails to notethat he was a member of the Communist Party for 10years after the novel's publication and wouldwrite about politics from an intelligentlyleftwing perspective for his whole life.

The Calvino preface is so nuanced that it toorequires an introduction, and Martin McLaughlin,who is responsible for the new translation, ablyprovides it. Calvino substantially re-edited thebook in 1954, toning down the Communism, misogynyand violence of his characters. (It is a littlemisleading to speak of the Communism, misogyny andviolence in this book because the tone of thestory is so far removed from the world of thoseadult concerns. Although Pin frequently describeswomen as "disgusting," this is, more than anythingelse, an eight-year old who thinks all girls havecooties.) Calvino declines to mention this re-editin his lengthy introduction, although McLaughlintoo generously offers that portions "hint" at anexplanation. This translation also adds someobscenities and a mention of the Soviet Union cutfrom the only previous English translation.

While Nests is a very good debut novel,it does not hold up next to Calvino's later work.The characters are thin. Chapter nine is anespecially egregious error: Here Calvinointroduces a new character, has him pedanticallyexplain the morality of the situation and thendrops him. But the book survives. It remains amoving portrait of the confusion and surreality ofwartime and of a little boy lost. If, ultimately,it is more interesting as an artifact of Calvino'syouth, that does not detract from its merit as anovel.

Towards the end of the preface, Calvino writes,"Perhaps, in the end, it is only your first bookthat counts, perhaps you should only write thatone and stop...the opportunity to express yourreal self happens only once, what you have to sayinside you is either said at that point ornevermore." Calvino's life demonstrates theuntruth of that statement. Nests is notCalvino's best book and is not where he expresseshis "real self" most interestingly. What makesNests worth-while for Calvino connoisseursis that his early work reveals a part of himselfthat is distinctly more personal from what thereader sees in his later work. Those new toCalvino would be better off starting else-where,but will find here a good story, well-told, thatcaptures the reality of wartime Italy, a poorboy's life, and the intersections of the two