The Watcher and Other Stories (Harbrace Paperbound Library)

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Each of us, according to his own knowledge and experience, attributes to the word “Communism” or the word “Cottolengo” various and even contradictory values, so even more precision would be required: the role of the party in that situation would have to be defined, in the Italy of those years, and Amerigo’s position within the party; and as for “Cottolengo,” otherwise known as the “Little Home of Divine Providence”—assuming that everyone knows the function of that enormous hospital, to shelter unfortunates, the afflicted, the mentally deficient, the deformed, even creatures who are hidden, whom no one can see—then it would be necessary to define Cottolengo’s place in the citizens’ pious sentiments, the respect it inspired even in those furthest from any religious feeling, and at the same time the quite different place it had come to occupy in pre-electoral polemics, almost as a synonym of fraud, of embezzlement, of prevarication.

ITALO CALVINO (1923-1985) attained worldwide renown as one of the twentieth century's greatest storytellers. They make this an annoyingly arty book, hiding more than not behind Hemingwayesque time-signatures and puerile repetitions about war (and memory and everything else, for that matter) being hell and heaven both. The entire town has this problem, and they go through all the different townsfolk's techniques for ridding themselves of the ants, but really those are just coping mechanisms.And finally, "The Argentine Ant" has a young couple and baby arriving in a country cottage -- only to get invaded by ants that evening.

The second story, Smog, has a more focused narrative, but by its end it was just as underwhelming as The Watcher. There they were, now using matches to melt some wax to seal the ballot box, and then they didn’t know how to snip off the extra length of string, so they decided to bum it with a match.

The last, The Argentine Ant, is about a young couple with an infant who move into their first house. All pages of text are present, but they may include extensive notes and highlighting or be heavily stained. A story about a terrible smog, a story about terrible ants--they felt like sister-stories, for sure.

This collection of three long stories by the author of Cosmicomics "demonstrates clearly his talent for transforming the mundane into the marvelous" ( The New York Times ). As a result of these instances, there was a crop of anecdotes, ranging from the burlesque to the pathetic: the voter who ate his ballot, the one who, finding himself in a booth with that piece of paper in his hand, thought he was in a latrine and behaved accordingly, or the line of slightly brighter retarded voters who entered the polls chanting the name of the candidate and his number on the ballot: “One two three: Quadrello!Also, the guy has a model (or at least rich, famous, and gorgeous) girlfriend that drops in on him a few times. We believe that books can lead to greater empathy and understanding in the world helping us open ourselves to other lives and experiences. Its essence, Calvino demon strates, is that the labor of pes simistic optimists such as the Communist Ormea and the op timistic pessimists of the Church and the conservative political parties yields the possibility of a city grander and more hu mane than either the Cot tolengo complex or Turin itself. A Serving of Crime with a Difference - You May Just Discover Something Unique, Different, or Unusual in These 20 Crime Novels.