Marcovaldo, Italo Calvino
Marcovaldo, Italo Calvino
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Marcovaldo

Author: Italo Calvino

Narrator: Edoardo Ballerini

Unabridged: 3 hr 51 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Recorded Books

Published: 11/10/2017

Categories: Fiction, Classic


Synopsis

A charming portrait of one man’s dreams and schemes, by “the greatest Italian writer of the twentieth century” (Guardian).

In this enchanting book of linked stories, Italo Calvino charts the disastrous schemes of an Italian peasant, an unskilled worker in a drab northern industrial city in the 1950s and ’60s, struggling to reconcile his old country habits with his current urban life.

Marcovaldo has a practiced eye for spotting natural beauty and an unquenchable longing for the unspoiled rural world of his imagination. Much to the continuing puzzlement of his wife, his children, his boss, and his neighbors, he chases his dreams and gives rein
to his fantasies, whether it’s sleeping in the great outdoors on a park bench, following a stray cat, or trying to catch wasps. Unfortunately, the results are never quite what he anticipates.

Spanning from the 1950s to the 1960s, the twenty stories in Marcovaldo are alternately comic and melancholy, farce and fantasy. Throughout, Calvino’s unassuming masterpiece “conveys the sensuous, tangible qualities of life” (New York Times).

About Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino (1923-1985) was an Italian journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy, the short story collection Cosmicomics, and the novels Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. He received numerous awards for his work, including the Riccione Prize and the Saint-Vincent Prize. Lionized in Britain and the United States, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer at the time of his death, and a noted contender for the Nobel Prize for Literature.


Reviews

Goodreads review by John on September 10, 2024

See my full list of Favorite Cinnamon Rolls in SFF Novels at Before We Go Blog. Marcovaldo is a pure and innocent man, captivated by the simple things in life. In this collection of short stories, Italo Calvino tells the tales of Marcovaldo as he experiences the four seasons living in a city somewher......more

Goodreads review by Uhtred on November 09, 2024

Marcovaldo is a book that I read for the first time when I was 8 years old and then, at intervals of about 10 years, I have always gladly reread. I would say that it is therefore a book that has marked my career as a reader. At the age of 8, I saw things there, which although not the ones that hit m......more

Goodreads review by David on December 02, 2014

Italo Calvino is always fun to read. While Marcovaldo does not have the Borgesian or post-modern tropes of Invisible Cities or If on a winter's night a traveller, it is a heart-warming collection of brilliantly crafted stories, the pinnacle achievement being the lovable naivete and inventive imagina......more

Goodreads review by Vonia on December 02, 2019

I actually really liked this one, more than I expected. This is my second from Italo Calvino, and although this is a far difference from ".... If on a Winter's Night a Traveler", it was almost as great, in different ways. Nice to find an author than can write well in multiple genres/styles. "Morcova......more