The Path to the Spiders' Nest

I’m going to just come out and say this.  I quite enjoyed The Path to the Spiders’ Nest.  I did not hate, or judge harshly while reading, an Italo Calvino book.  Maybe my tastes are growing up.  Far more likely, I enjoyed this because it’s Calvino’s first novel from back in the days when he still believed stories should have crazy things like plots.  At this point in my rant, I realise that for all my well-readliness, I am (on occasion) very much like my mother.  She likes things like narrative in novels, and there are almost 200 pages of narrative in this one.

The Path to the Spiders’ Nest tells the story of Pin, a young Italian boy too used to the company of adults in pubs to be appropriate friends for children and too naïve to really hang with the grown-ups, in the time of the Second World War.  After he steals a gun from a German sailor to impress his adult friends, he is forced into a war he doesn’t really understand.  He spends most of the book hanging out with a group of anti-fascist freedom fighters in the mountains and trying to sound cool by telling far too many people about this gun he nicked and the titular hiding place he chose for it.

Pin is young and the partisan group he ends up with do not take him seriously, he ends up falling into a catch 22 situation where the more that he tries to impress them, the less they believe he has the goods.  But The Path to the Spiders’ Nest is a good book and it’s a good book about war and politics.  Calvino really captures a child’s innocent and lack of understanding about the wider issues throughout the book and I think that it would only have been made more enjoyable if I actually knew a bit more about Italy’s role in World War Two.  Other than having a stellar train system, I’m probably a little bit ignorant about Mussolini’s role.

Another reason that I enjoyed this book was that it really reminded me of For Whom the Bell Tolls by Ernest Hemingway.  And no, it doesn’t come close to how fantastic that book is (I could go on and on about the style of that book alone), but there are similarities.  Pin is entrenched in a group of militant extremists hiding out in the hills and, quite frequently, disagreeing about the philosophy of fighting. 

One of my favourite parts of the book is an impassioned speech about the different ways in which people define their country and how it impacts upon their decision whether to fight for it.  Granted, there’s no fabulous side story about bullfighting but you can’t have everything in such a short book.

In all, I think this might have changed my perception of Calvino a bit.  Invisible Cities and If On A Winter’s Night A Traveller… both made me think that he was just a bit pretentious.  But maybe he was like Picasso who mastered the basics of how to draw things before he moved on to all that Cubist shit.  Of course, the great flaw in this theory is that I’ve always kind of like that Cubist shit.

The final Lake District read was The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain.  Swing by soon for that.  I will be insulting it lots.