Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature by Eugenio Bolongaro (review)

528 Reviews Leake's brief summary of Silone's later works), the play's successive revisions, and the betrayal theme in La volpe e le camelie. Leake concludes with an appeal for con? tinued intellectual curiosity as regards cases such as Silone's, a welcome yet strangely open ending to a study that mostly seems to want to present an open-and-shut case. New College, Oxford Deborah Holmes Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature. By Eugenio Bolongaro. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. 2003. x + 239pp. ?32. ISBN 0-8020-8763-9. At firstglance Bolongaro's book seems to propose a critical analysis of fivenovels by Calvino, spanning slightly more than a decade of his early production (from / giovani del Po, 1951, to La giornata di uno scrutatore, 1963). However, closer scrutiny reveals that this is actually a political book in disguise, a book about the role of the intellec? tual in the 1950s and his/her relationship with Marxist ideology and the structure of political power. The opening chapters set out the general theoretical tone of this book, which is marked by the assumption that Calvino shaped his literary trajectory according to a rigorous intellectual and epistemological project, in response to the general ideo? logical climate of Italy in the late 1940s and 1950s. Much of what is said is not new, but serves as a backdrop against which the author puts forward his main storyline: how Calvino moved fromcommitment to scepticism, remaining one ofthe most lucid and intellectually alert voices of twentieth-century Italian literature, while keeping a critical distance from the political apparatus of the Left. Bolongaro does not take into consideration the two other main neo-realist works of the period, La speculazione edilizia (1957) and La nuvola dismog (1958). This omission suggests that his idea was to construct a critical narrative, which would envisage Calvino as an author entrapped in the cul-de-sac of neo-realist poetics who will eventually dig his way out by carving the fantastic jewels of the Antenati trilogy. In Bolongaro's narrative, Calvino reopens his eyes, thirteen years later, to contemporary social reality with La giornata di uno scrutatore, through which he draws the conclusion of his political and intellectual experience in a crucial decade of Italian and European history, while he bows out from the conviction of being able to express a radical critique and a fair analysis of contemporary society that could have an impact on the socio-political sphere. The core ofthe book sees the author embarking on a thorough analysis ofthe failure of Calvino's attempt to adhere to a neo-realist aesthetic with his novel /giovani del Po, while he finds in the fantastic vein of the Antenati trilogy the best expressive means to address various issues about the role of the intellectual in society facing the contra? dictions and tensions of an unprecedented capitalist development. As Bolongaro puts it: 'the non-realist genre allows Calvino to keep alive the progressive moment of the neo-realist poetics (the value of wholeness and human integration), while rejecting the complacency that undermined it, a complacency that was increasingly out of step with the historical situation' (p. 79). The fantastic also provides a genre that 'allows the author to avoid pat ideological answers' (p. 97). The trilogy,then, farfrom being a form of aesthetic escapism, is read as a straightforward critique of the doctrinal hegemony of the PCI, the transformation of Italian leftistintellectuals into 'clerics', as Bourdieu would put it, serving in turn a 'conservative role': 'the vast majority of Italian intellectuals were cultually conservative at the same time that they were politically progressive' (p. 51). Agilulfo in 77 cavaliere inesistentetherefore becomes the emblem of the 'type of intellectual envisaged [. . .] by Zhdanovian theory and practice [. . .] the type of intellectual that a misguided and Stalinist reinterpretation of Gramsci's notion of the organic intellectual could yield' (pp. 156-57). MLRy 100.2, 2005 529 The book is persuasive, and it also presents instances of exegetical precision and exhaustiveness. However, the argument could be better pieced together and interwoven more tightly.The book plunges too abruptly into the analysis of / giovani del Po, without providing even the briefest...

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