Author(s): Italo Calvino

Fiction

This book deals both with a transition from adolescence into youth and with a move from peace to war: as for very many other people, for the protagonist of this book entry into life and entry into war coincide. from the Author s Note These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino s memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini s army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades. The callow narrator of these tales observes the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in its first English translation, "Into the War" is one of Calvino s only works of autobiographical fiction. It offers both a glimpse of this writer s extraordinary life and a distilled dram of his wry, ingenious literary voice. All three stories attest to the potentially magical, transformative space of adolescence . . . The seeds of the later Calvino the fabulist who worked profound moral and ethical points into his narratives are all here. Joseph Luzzi, "Times Literary Supplement""