Name: Our Ancestors
Rating: 3.6 (5 reviews)

Italo Calvino

Viscount Medardo is bisected by a Turkish cannonball on the plains of Bohemia; Baron Cosimo, at the age of twelve, retires to the trees for the rest of his days; Charlemagne's knight, Agiluf, is an empty suit of armour. These three vivid images are the points of departure for Calvino's classic triptych of moral tales, now published in one volume and all displaying the exuberant talent of a master storyteller.

Three Novels

Our Ancestors

Three Novels : The Cloven Viscount, Baron in the Trees, The Non-existent Knight

Tim Pendry

This volume pulls together two novellas and one novel written across the length of the 1950s by Italo Calvino as partial pastiches of past literature, all with an implied commentary about the position of the intellectual in post-war Italy. This tells us all we need to know about the strengths and weaknesses of the work. On the one hand, Calvino writes fluently and with a mastery of the forms he is working with – the (comic) Gothic novel, the moral tale of the Enlightenment and the courtly romance – but he is soon falling into the post-modern trap of saying very little of any depth extremely well. Why is this? Perhaps it is because he is embarrassed. He is a bourgeois intellectual and instinctive aesthete who wants to be a socialist in an age of hard-nosed Marxists. He is trying to keep his nose high from the stench of politics and compromise while being a man of the Left. How does he try and do this. By metaphorically staying up in the trees and trying to appropriate the great European literary tradition for a basic liberal decency that reminds us of the similar and often not quite convincing efforts of Camus to do the same in 1950s France. Calvino tries lightness of touch instead of trying to meet the sour-pusses of the old Left on their own puritan ground as Camus did. This means that the works are (mostly) enjoyable but also rather shallow, a case of educated bourgeois knowingly speaking unto educated bourgeois. For all the claims Calvino was to make about abstracting the authentic vision of the common man from traditional literature (exemplified by his remarkable knowledge of folk tales), his work requires a fair amount of education to appreciate fully. There is an inherent ‘snobbisme’ in it. The stories of good and evil disembodied in the cloven viscount, the young aristocrat who takes to the trees and stays there and the knight who is perfect but does not exist are all well told and give an insight into the minds of an elite uncomfortable with modernity and yet committed to it. The contrast with Di Lampedusa’s ‘The Leopard’, published around the same time, coming, in this latter case, from a genuine aristocrat whose compromise with modernity came from necessity and not from ideology, is striking. The bourgeoisie’s continuing interest in the aristocracy is amusing. They will not let go of the past. Our genuine aristocrat can (paradoxically): he speaks of the past as the past whereas Calvino tries to bring the past into the future, turning tragedy perhaps into farce. Italo Calvino’s short introduction is worth reading in this context. He refers to his initial engagement with the post-war fashion for social realism after the victory of the partisans over Mussolini but (in his late twenties) decided to follow his heart and Robert Louis Stevenson. This tension between his literary aestheticism and the politics of engagement are being worked through in these works and that is why they are good but not great. They are neither one thing nor the other – the politics is obscure and the adventuring cloaked in too much implicit meaning. In the end, it is all too clever by half. It makes you feel superior for understanding things the ‘hoi polloi’ won’t get but there is no way this is a voice for the common man … interesting, amusing but locked in its time and in the past simultaneously.

Our Ancestors Three Novels

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