“Not to be frightened anymore, that’s the final aim of man.”
(This may contain spoilers, but nothing that will endanger your ability to enjoy this incredible book in all its tangy literary glory.)
“The Path to the Spiders’ Nest” was written by Italo Calvino when he was just twenty-three years old. The novel became an instant hit, something Calvino did not expect as such a young and unknown writer in a relatively saturated market. He has since composed essays making distictions between this book from his main body of work. He may not be the biggest fan of it himself, but as a disciple of Calvino, I think it is a fantastic read and I can’t see any reason that he would be ashamed to write it, somewhat simple prose and general inexperience as a writer aside.
This novel has so many elements that I adore in the books I love. It takes place in northern Italy at the close of second world war. For some, this may not be a huge selling point but I am very interesting in WWII and post-war literature. It describes love and war told from the eyes of a misguided youth while a chorus of imperfect characters hoarsely sing the sad truths of life touched by love, hate, and other humans. It makes it oddly simple to parallel the lives of the characters, fighting for their lives and their country in the resistance against the Germans, to the reader’s own life because of the resounding truths echoing throughout the pages. It highlights the importance of individual lives in the broad and terrifying scope of war and history. It supports a humanitarian perspective of life and blurs the glaring distinctions so often attributed to making a clean separation between childhood and adulthood.
One of the first things I’d like to note is that each character in the book (and indeed, each human being on this earth) has his own way of evading the harsh truths of war and death. Some become overly-invested in the political aspects of the war, and they convince themselves that they are willing to fight and die for such values. Some use humor to dull the sharp pangs of reality. Others still invest their thoughts in hobbies or pursuits of sex or power. Because Pin, the main character, is thrown into this adult world of war, politics, pain, and sex as a lonely and oblivious youngster, we go along with him taking everything he sees and hears at face value. Pin wants to trust adults, he is desperately searching for someone to care for him, but he is constantly let down by the grown-ups’ inconsistencies, skewed by their passions and desires that he cannot even begin to comprehend.
Pin’s fears concerning the terrible truths of war and human nature are covered up by an adult humor he hardly understands, but that he has perfected by constantly gaging the reactions of his elders. He is viewed as a crude and nasty boy, but he continues to vie for any attention he can acquire and delights in it, however short-term the notice he receives often is. His only real comfort is in the knowledge of his secret place, the place where the spiders lay their eggs. He refers to the nests as “magic places” and vows to show them to the person (who he is seeking throughout the story) who he can trust and will consider a true friend. His search is difficult and often very sad.
We walk with history everyday. Young Calvino’s characters in this novel stop to recognize this fact from time to time. They are painfully aware of their own mortality. One wraps himself in a blanket as he prepares for battle and wonders where the blanket will be at the end of the day: if he does not die, he will continue to use it for warmth, but he imagines it warming the enemy when he is killed. And when they die? And so on. One of my favorite characters in the book is the self-appointed-psychologist commissioner, Kim, because of the the amount of time and insight Calvino allows to describe his personal thoughts. Kim thinks about love and history as intertwined, because perhaps the only thing that matters in the grand scheme of everything is these two things. He imagines the life of an enemy soldier waking up from sleep, alone. He imagines the enemy soldier thinking, “I love you, Kate.” Kim muses,
‘In six or seven hours he’ll be dead, we’ll have killed him; even if he hadn’t thought, “I love you, Kate,” it would have been the same; everything that he does or thinks is lost, cancelled from history.’
And he tries to imagine his own fate differently, he sees himself making history, he imagines his love not lost, but perhaps sacrificed for history. He talks about great consequences. He says, “all the thoughts I’m having now will influence my history tomorrow, and the history of the human race.” We can see he uses his great love to continue fighting, putting one foot in front of the other, rationalizing his participation in a war that is difficult to make sense of. “Who is Kim?” he must keep asking himself. At one point he calls himself a Bolshevik, “a man who dominates situations.” He tells himself “a, b, c,” he must remind himself what his purpose is, and in what order he must perform his duties. But is Kim’s main duty to be a war commissioner or a lover? Is he a thinker or a fighter? We all have these moments, and it isn’t until we taste death or become close to our own end that these questions can be filtered down to their essence. The last paragraph of Kim’s crowning existential chapter is summed up:
“Tomorrow there will be a big battle. Kim is serene. ‘A, b, c,’ he’ll say. Again and again he thinks: ‘I love you, Adriana.’ That, and that alone, is history.”
The book’s final moments wrap up the tale with a strange happiness that I couldn’t have possibly expected. There is something incredibly touching about the changes that overcome Pin, who one can’t help but be both completely repulsed and intrigued by throughout the novel. One also can’t help but feel strongly for the people he encounters and the friends and enemies he makes on his journey. We are left to ponder the minute differences between childhood and adulthood, and it is sweet relief at the end of the book to be able to admit that age can make very little difference on our humility and capacity to live and love after all. “‘Our heads are still full of magic and miracles,’ thinks Kim.”
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