THE BARON IN THE TREES - ITALO CALVINO, trans. ARCHIBALD COLQUHOUN & ANA GOLDSTEIN

It’s been a while since I’ve read some Calvino. I remember sitting in on an Evergreen college class when I was in high school and hearing these college students discuss, IF ON A WINTER’S NIGHT, A TRAVER and being very captivated by the story. I proceeded to read that book and a handful of others, I believe this is the 5th book of his I’ve read (the best remains INVISIBLE CITIES, an all-time banger/hall-of-famer) and it maintains the sort of fairytale, fable aspect that I’m drawn to in his work. I understand he has some autobiographical, realists novels as well, which maybe I’ll read someday, but when you’ve got this gift to spin super-imaginative yarns and dizzyingly postmodernist tales, why wouldn’t you? This book doesn’t include some of the more mind-bendy aspects of something like IOAWNAT but it is still quite whimsical. The plot can be summed up quite quickly: the son of an Italian baron, named Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò, is asked to finish his snail soup by his father at a meal when he’s a child. Cosimo doesn’t want to, gets into a small fight with his dad, and climbs up a tree, vowing not to return to the earth. And he doesn’t. He spends his whole life in the trees, a life we see through the eyes of his more conventional, earth-bound, younger brother. This might seem like a silly, flimsy premise for a whole novel but Calvino manages to keep it engaging and moving the whole time. Cosimo solves the basic issues of living in the trees, like how to eat and cook and get around and sleep and create shelter. He then embarks on a number of adventures, like fighting pirates, and love affairs. Cosimo’s life maps onto the age of Enlightenment and his activities map onto some of the larger trends in Europe. He writes to Voltaire, he and other characters react to the French Revolution, he meets Napoleon, in a scene that humorously inverts the famous Diogenes/Alexander interaction (which I feel Calvino slightly undercuts by having a character literally point out the similarities, he should trust his readers to get references this obvious) and generally acts as a sort of metaphor for the age. This, to me, is most effective when Calvino lets us understand the perception of the regular peasants, for whom the Baron is a silly rich guy doing silly rich guy things, at least largely harmless in Cosimo’s case, which is a great critique of the Enlightenment and one I wish we had more of. There’s a love plot that has a surprisingly downbeat ending, I was expecting either true love or a more tragic conclusion, what we get in the book feels more real (which is weird for a book about a guy who lives in the trees for no real reason), which is to say misunderstandings, mistakes and disspointments that don’t resolve. The ending is especially great (spoilers). The baron is dying in a bed they’ve taken into the tree for him, and, not even wanting his body to return to the earth in death, he manages to use the last of his strength to catch a rope hanging from a passing hot-air balloon and dies somewhere up in the sky, his body never recovered, persumably lost at sea. 1815 trees.