Another, a factory owner and the worst polluter in the city, tries to redeem himself by funding "The Institute for the Purification of the Urban Atmosphere in Industrial Centers.

Really enjoyed Smog and to a lesser extent Argentine Ant, which both have a good balance of comedic insights and thought provoking ideas.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. I'm jumping around in my reading some these days, so it might be a while before I get back to the other 2 stories in this collection for a final review.

One quick note: the title, "The Argentine Ant" is not describing a place, it is describing a species of ant, and your current reviewer mentions this with a good deal of embarrassment as for twenty odd years it was thought that Calvino's story took place in the country of Argentina in South America - Ha! The second story, Smog, has a more focused narrative, but by its end it was just as underwhelming as The Watcher. Bumped corners and the usual signs of circulation, adhesive and paper remnants to front pastedown and rear endpapers, stamps to title page, TOC and a few other pages with a couple blackouts.

Amerigo looked around once again, as if seeking the tangible presence of a contrary force, an antithesis, but he could grasp nothing, he could no longer set the affairs of the polls against the atmosphere that surrounded them: in the quarter of an hour he had been there, things and places had become homogeneous, joined in a sole, anonymous, administrative grayness, the same in police stations and regional offices as in the great charitable institutions.

The institution sprawled among poor, crowded neighborhoods, covering as much space as a whole quarter of the city, including a complex of asylums and hospitals and homes for the aged, schools, convents, virtually a city within the city, surrounded by walls and governed by different rules. Who would think, Amerigo said to himself, now determined to see everything in the best possible light, that women have enjoyed their civil rights for so few years? He may mean to send up the diehard's tendency toward philosophical musings, but they are droning and often repetitive and not particularly exciting to read. He washes his hands compulsively as he observes how the urbanites deal with a dirty fog that is intensifying its grip on the city.

I'm not saying that by not reading this book you are suffocating a little part of you that would truly make you better inside, but that's exactly what I'm saying.

But there is a moment, beforehand, when the election officials are alone, sitting there counting the pencils, a moment that rends the heart. Read more about the condition New: A new, unread, unused book in perfect condition with no missing or damaged pages.

Italo Calvino's earlier works, like these three stories, were grounded in standard plots and standard character development.