The Baron in the Trees

I entitle this post in allusion to the novel I have most recently completed--naught but eight minutes have passed between reading the final word and engraving the title of this entry in the appropriate area. The novel is Italian, but Archibald Colquhoun graciously translated Italo Calvino's prose for my pleasure. It is my duty and obligation as a reader to share with you what a wonderful experience I've just experienced in this world of literature.

For a good two thirds of the book, the protagonist--brother of the narrator--leads us through his childhood and young adulthood. It's a fairly interesting story, and is populated with intriguing bits and pieces of philosophy and fact. The author populates the chapters with phrases that stand out against the tone of the book; the most recent one to catch my eye was the narrator's statement, "So began their love, the boy happy and amazed, she happy and not surprised at all (nothing happens by chance to girls)." While I could drone on and on about the various implications and suggestions provoked by this passage, I'll leave that to my audience as an extension of Calvino's audience.

This first part of the book has a mild taste and a pleasing aftertaste. The story is engaging enough to draw further the reader, and all of a sudden the story twists into a climax which ends in despair, and the last third of the book is the denouement as the sympathetic character finishes the last two thirds of his life in absolute insanity. This twist, particularly the end of it, almost caused me to put the book down permanently, but my desire for knowledge and hope and the author's style drew me further, although the falling action has no such strength as the climax or even naive enjoyment as the initial epoch of the character's life. The story describes the conscious human life from beginning to end and the truth and absolute pattern matching from the early years scare me to fucking death because of its potential for truth in the later years. That I relate so closely in fantasy to this protagonist strikes fear into my heart because I can see the patterns that drew him into his predicament that changed his life for the worse and I can identify the same in my mind. While I have not the grit or gall to make the life-changing decision he does so early on, I may have the moronic apathy and arrogance to follow his steps to destruction.

Aside from the normal complete envelopment of fiction, this story has completely enveloped me. Reading for hours after I intended to fall asleep, I'm more awake now, nearly three hours into the new day, than I was at midnight, and I'm still agitated and excited and horrified and unnerved at that one twist in the perfect story. I finished the rest of the book with that taste in my mouth, with that thought before even the incoming stream of words, not as a filter but a distraction.

The final paragraph in the book is something of wonder. I won't comment, only quote:

Ombrosa no longer exists. Looking at the empty sky, I ask myself if it ever did really exist. That mesh of leaves and twigs of fork and froth, minute and endless, with the sky glimpsed only in sudden specks and splinters, perhaps it was only there so that my brother could pass through it with his tomtit's tread, was embroidered on nothing, like this thread of ink which I have let run on for page after page, swarming with cancellations, corrections, doodles, blots and gaps, bursting at times into clear big berries, coagulating at others into piles of tiny starry seeds, then twisting away, forking off, surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless cluster of words, ideas, dreams, and so ends.

Nay, I lied, I must comment! What an ending. The first two sentences cower in the shadow of the third and final, whose literary beauty is matched by few in all of my experience. It's a truly epic sentence. How much it arouses, represents, embraces!

"I ask myself if it ever did really exist." I could ramble for hours on the amazing depth of this very statement.

"You can't do this without putting in the bad and the ugly as well as what is beautiful. Because if it is all beautiful you can't believe in it. Things aren't that way." Again, it holds true. Ever closer I dig to the universal principle. My drive to succeed is renewed; life again has a drive to its purpose.