The Watcher and Other Stories     by Italo Calvino, Translated by W et al Weaver Original title: La giornata di una scrutatore Original language: Italian Published by Harcourt Pub. Date: 1976 Format: Paperback, 181 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.48 x 7.99 x 5.33 ISBN: 0156949520 Edition: 1st Edition List Price: $11.00, £6.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $8.80 Published by Secker & Warburg Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover Not available for ordering

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A fairly early work that uncannily captures the atmosphere of a rapidly industrialising, modernising Northern Italy in the late 1950s. Calvino’s genius as a writer is to travel beyond the satirical (stereotyped clerks and advertising men) into a convincingly acidulous vision of a city all shine and sparkle on the outside but simultaneously pervaded by dirt and unease.


To accomplish the writerly mission of capturing the world afresh he adopts the technique of looking through the eyes of impossibly innocent creatures. In the story Smog, the clerk who works for the Air Pollution Institute (controlled by industrialists busy poisoning the atmosphere) is shown an illustrated propaganda magazine about Soviet life by a communist acquaintance and sees only ‘An Asiatic race, with fur caps and boots, blissfully going to fish in a river.’ This Arcadian vision of Soviet Central Asia under Stalin — in reality a hell of forced industrialisation, nuclear testing and political tyranny — is presented in a way that mixes the character’s faux-naiveté with the writer’s ruthless irony: ‘I had been looking,’ the clerk tells us, ‘for a new image of the world which would give meaning to our grayness, which would compensate for all the beauty that we were losing...’


In The Watcher the naive eye is turned onto politics and sees election posters, one pasted over the other in ‘a patina of paste and cheap paper, where, layer upon layer, the symbols of the opposing parties could be read, transparently .’ An effective image of Italian politics where a plethora of parties, financed out of the public purse, use these funds to cover with meaningless slogans the walls of every village in the land, which finally merge into an indistinguishable mess of paper particles and garish party symbols. A attack on a corrupt system that like the story Smog, is full of foresight.


The Watcher is a story about the morality of politics and about political duty in the widest sense. An election scrutineer visits a huge ‘home for unfortunates’, the Cottolengo Hospital in Turin and longs for his mistress. A sign of a great writer might be how he or she lures us unwittingly into new and uncomfortable thoughts, as here where Calvino sets up a wicked contrast between the sad drabs of Cottolengo and the girl who is his lover.

‘Resigned to spending the whole day amongst these drab, colourless creatures, A. felt a yearning for beauty, which became focused in the thought of his mistress, Lia. And what he remembered of Lia was her skin, her colour, and above all one point of her body — where her back arched, distinct and taut, to be caressed with the hand, and then the gentle, swelling curve of the hips — a point where he now felt the world’s beauty was concentrated, remote, lost.’ p21