Name: Under the Jaguar Sun
Rating: 4.285714285714286 (7 reviews)
ISBN: 9780156927949

Italo Calvino

Three tales, each dominated by one of three senses, present a married couple touring Mexico, a tyrant made prisoner of contradictory messages, and a fashionable Parisian and a drugged rock musician impassioned by scents

Under the Jaguar Sun

Tim Pendry

Three light weight and mannered stories, the detritus perhaps of some ultimate 'larger' project, though one is suspicious that these 80 or so pages were dumped on to the market at full price to cash in on a brand. This ends my attempt to find something valuable in Calvino's corpus. Five books later, I think I only enjoyed one ('Our Ancestors') and two, including this one, are destined for re-sale or the charity shop. The complaints are aired well enough in the other reviews and perhaps it is me, with my distaste for mannerism and intellectual legerdemain in literature, that is the problem. But I do have a sneaking suspicion that, for all the enthusiasm, he was over-promoted by his peers who developed a taste for trickery as salve for their growing irrelevance as a class - the literateur class. We move on ... let us revisit Umberto Eco.

A couple on an epicurean journey across Mexico are excited by the idea of a particular ingredient, suggested by ancient rituals of human sacrifice. Precariously balanced on his throne, a king is able only to listen to the sounds around him - sure that any deviation from their normal progression would mean the uprising of the conspirators that surround him. And three different men search desperately for the beguiling scents of lost women, from a Count visiting Madame Odile's perfumery, to a London drummer stepping over spent, naked bodies.

Interesting how rich and succulent sensory experiences are that we (well, Italo Calvino and other geniuses) can extract expressions from each sense into a world of its own. His writings are loud, beautiful, and riveting. My favorite short story's probably the first one that explores gustatory sense, simply because I like food and conversing characters. But all three are nice. Ah, this inspires me to writeeeeeeeee.

Under the Jaguar Sun

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