Numbers in the Dark
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0544146425
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Written between 1943 and 1984, the stories in Numbers in the Dark span the career of one of fiction’s modern masters: from Italo Calvino’s earliest fables, to tales informed by life in World War II–era Italy, to the delightful experimentation that would define his later work. Here are speculative stories on life in the digital age, genre-bending wonders, and “impossible interviews” with the likes of Montezuma and a Neanderthal. Deftly translated by Tim Parks, Numbers in the Dark shows off Calvino’s lifelong gift for subtle humor and shimmering philosophical insight.
“Numbers in the Dark is a glorious grab-bag . . . [with] enough gems from every phase in Calvino’s career to make it feel indispensable.” — Seattle Times
matter. 105 Numbers in the Dark And then what could ever really matter to Enrico? Nothing in the whole world. Yet this town he was now racing across, carefree and bold, had once been a kind of fakir’s bed for him, with a shriek, a fall, a sharp nail wherever you looked: old buildings, new buildings, cheap housing projects or aristocratic apartments, derelict shells or building site scaffolding, the town had once presented itself as a maze of problems: Style, Function, Society, the Human
at the same time he made a gesture as though stretching something between his hands, a string, a ribbon, a child’s little chain. ‘It’s got sentimental value for us. So you give it to me and I’ll pay,’ and he made to pull out his wallet. The unemployed Fiorenzo stretched out a hand, as though to say: ‘I haven’t got it,’ but then was careful not to say so, and with his hand still stretched out said instead: ‘That’ll be hard work, looking for something in the middle of all this . . . it’ll take
sort of shiver, a tremor, at which the most expert of us say: ‘There, a missile passing at twenty thousand kilometres an hour; a little slower, if I’m not mistaken, than the one that went by last Thursday.’ Now, since this missile business has been in the air, many of us have been seized by a strange euphoria. Some of the village witch–doctors, in fact, have led us to believe, by inference, that since this shooting star originates from beyond Kilimanjaro, it is the sign foreseen in the Great
once have been a residential suburb, though there’s nothing left now but a crooked house on a hump of ground surrounded by derelict car dumps; the lighted windows of the Roessler boarding house emerge from the fog as though on a short–sighted retina. Skiller and Waldemar don’t know each other as yet. Each unaware of the other, they stalk around the house. Who will make the first move? Indisputably the insurance agent takes precedence. Skiller rings the doorbell. ‘Please excuse me, on behalf of my
our struggle with nature begins, a nature that is first our enemy, then is gradually subdued to our will, a process lasting thousands of years that Mr Neander has evoked so powerfully in the dramatic scene of the bearhunt, a myth almost of the founding of our history . . . NEANDER: It was me was there. Not you. There was the bear. Where I go the bear comes. The bear is all around where I am, if not, not. INTERVIEWER: Right. It seems that our Mr Neander’s mental horizon goes no further than that