One of Calvino’s later works, Under the Jaguar Sun aims to do the thing that’s hardest for the writer: touch the reader’s senses.
Books have a distancing effect: to read one, we imagine ourselves out of our bodies, and into the scene depicted on the page. Under the Jaguar Sun wants to short-circuit us back into our meatsacks using specifically-written stories about taste, smell, and sound. Not sight and touch, notably. Calvino never completed those. In an afterword, his wife urges us to think of the three written stories, and forget the two unwritten ones. (In any case, there are more than five senses).
The first story in the cycle is “taste”, or Sotto il sole giaguaro. A pair of tourists explore Mexican locales such as Tepoztlán and Monte Alban, eating local cuisine such as chiles en nogada and guajolote con mole poblano while reflecting on the history of the region. Conflicting flavors are used to symbolize religious and political strife, as well as possibly their own sexual tension. Calvino focuses on the exterior state of the characters: we’re meant to infer things from Olivia’s flaring nostrils, or the pause of her lips. Soon the narrator isn’t staring at his partner’s eyes, but at her teeth.
He suspects that she may want to eat him, driving fangs through the softness of his skin, as a jaguar might. His mind fills with bloody images: cut-out hearts, and blood steaming upon temple altars. I wonder if there are things not said: and that food is a distraction for something unspeakable about their relationship.
The prose of William Weaver’s translation is itself a bit too rich at times, evoking those terrible cooking blogs (“…somewhat wrinkled little peppers, swimming in a walnut sauce whose harshness and bitter aftertaste were drowned in a creamy, sweetish surrender”). I could have done with less of that, but I was relieved that the characters can’t remember if cilantro is the same thing as coriander.
Eating is described as an act of travel. You are digesting a country and its history—and if that history is a bloody one, what effect will eating have on you? Calvino (through his narrator) scorns the poor imitations of “regional” food found in big restaurants, which he considers as fake as stage dressing on a movie set. But Mexico isn’t what it once was. The narrator imagines the hot, ancient land that Cortez once walked through…but that place doesn’t doesn’t exist anymore. He’s just summarizing ruins, inventorying echoes of echoes. He prizes “real” food because that’s the only form of reality available to him.
Un re in ascolto is the next story, themed upon “hearing”. It’s a lot of fun, much better than the first, with some great writing and the same twisted fairytale quality of Marcel Schwob. It also reminded me of the Truman Show.
A king sits upon a throne, a virtual prisoner. His crown is uncomfortable but he cannot move his head to adjust it. His scepter is heavy but it must never leave his hand. His throne doubles as a bedpan so he can relieve himself without ever being out of sight of his adoring subjects. In short, he might as well be made of glass. He’s inactive, defunct, just a monarch-object who exists to sit and be admired by the court until his death.
Which might come sooner rather than later. Despite existing under such pitiless, endless love, the king knows he is surrounded by enemies. Whether he’s right or merely paranoid doesn’t matter to us. He’s convinced that men are plotting and scheming in court: the palace is full of his spies, but they cannot catch everyone, and although reams of surveillance and interrogation are piled at his feet, there is too much of it to read.
With his eyes useless, he relies on hearing. The king learns to enjoy the sound of the wind blowing along the corridors; the sound of the guards slamming rifle butts in salute on the battlements. And soon, beyond the baldaquin of his hollow coffin-throne, the king hears a woman singing a love song…
It’s a good one—maybe a great one—about paranoia and suspicion and obsession. It made me feel closed-in and itchy. Uneasy hangs the head that wears the crown? No, it’s the ears beneath the crown that are the trouble. They keep complicating things.
Lastly comes Il nome, il naso, or “smell”. It’s a wild, decadent romp, braiding together three separate stories and letting strange things happen from their union. We get the perspectives of a wild beast, a French decadent rather like Huysmans’ Jean des Esseintes, and a drug-addicted musician. They are united by search for sensation, which is most potent in the form of olfaction.
It’s the shortest but also the messiest of the stories, and I can’t say I understood much of it. But that might be entirely appropriate: smell is the most fragile and easily overwhelmed of the senses, for me. The eyes see endlessly, the ears hear endlessly, and both touch and taste . But scents, however, quickly go dead. I’m not sure that I’d want to live in a world where the nose is king, but that’s the point of the story, we once did. And maybe there’s something latent there, hidden in our DNA and ready to become manifest.
This is an intimate and voluptous volume, and the fact that it’s incomplete reveals something important about senses: they often go away. A single lesion in the brain might take one (or more) of them away, silencing a world of meaning. In this book, we are blind and anaphiac. Sometimes we understand. Sometimes we grope in confusion.
It’s worth reading if you can find it cheap, and it encapsules much of what made Calvino great as a writer. It sets fires in the mind, and opens the imagination to worlds and words beyond, barely glimpsed off the margins of the page.
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You would not believe how fucking mad I was when I could not taste and smell when this girl got me COVID during the beginning spell of the quarantine. I ran to my fridge and I started putting everything in my mouth and up my nose. I could only taste salty and hot hot hot! But the scary thing was that I couldn’t even smell smoke, which is the one thing that usually bothers me most. That was the scariest thing. I wanted to cry when I thought my smell would never come back cause I would miss hugging this girl and smelling her hair (yeah that same girl that gave me covid!) you know when you hug someone so close and so strong you can smell them, almost taste them.
I heard if this math professor that was doing chin ups and the bar broke, he fell so hard and hit the back of his head so hard that he lost his sense of smell. He also broke his nose but that wasn’t related, nothing hit his face, he just hit the back of his head so hard his nose broke. But he was talking about how he couldn’t taste or smell after and how he gained his senses back by tasting and smelling rotted things like spoil milk and stuff and it actually work. He like, re-learned to taste and smell…
anyways, that a bit of senses, but I wanted to write to say what’s up Ben! I’m still catching up on he Whitechapel/Aldapuerta stuff but I saw this and had to tell you I love Italo Calvino! I’m surprised you liked this. I started reading cause I thought you were gonna shit on it like you and Whitechapel shit on pretty much everything I liked but I guess that’s just what I need to truly know what’s inherently good and fundamentally worthwhile. It’s difficult to know and I’m thankful for your writing to help guide me in that directionless direction. So thank you for writing, I’m still reading.
Also, I just notice, Simon Whitechapell put that Survey thing at the end of Gweel that was also at the end of Aldapuerta’s The Eyes, The Winnowing. The exact same thing. If I would’ve read that first I would’ve definitely come to the conclusion that he is Jesus Ignacio Aldapuerta, he’s not even trying to hide it!
But one of my favorite books ever is Invisible Cities by Calvino. I hope all is well and you’re doing good. I read Brought to Light by Alan Moore and Joyce Brabner and it was interesting. Do you know any other cool conspircy theory stuff? Extra points if they’re real.
Comment by Justin — 2023-11-22 @ 08:15
That’s having COVID with style. I got it and all I did was sit around for a few days. Apparently you can track COVID outbreaks by Amazon reviews of scented candles. Suddenly there will be a wave of one-star reviews from nice old ladies complaining that their candles have suddenly become scentless. Funny how that happens. Though I guess some of those ladies are dead now. Not so funny how that happens.
Weird. I assumed we were born knowing how to smell and taste things, but maybe we have to learn. Not sure.
A Tumblr friend once claimed his personality changed due to long COVID. He became bisexual (was straight before), became more extroverted, gained “3D vision” (whatever that means), and saw a ton of other changes. He died about three months ago. Apparently he had brain cancer, and long COVID was unrelated.
Thanks. Sorry if I shit on things you like—rest assured, it’s not intentional. I actually don’t know what you like, BTW. What do you like?
Well, I’ll be a poked pig in a blanket! I asked him if he’d changed anything and he said “A few minor changes and the essays on Waugh and CAS were cut, but otherwise it’s the same book”. Which maybe supports the theory that Gweel and the Eyes are secretly the same book, just written in different text. I’m sure you’ll agree that most of Gweel’s stories exist in the shadow of depraved events (why is everyone in jail? Wither the serial killers in “Beating the Meat”?): they’re just not described on the page as Aldapuerta would do.
Thanks. If you have any further recommendations for weird/offbeat books, let me know. I need more. Many more. Hundreds, if I can get them.
Re: conspiracy theories, I know a few. Like joe1orbit, an infamous 90s newsgroup troll who may be a serial killer. Or that time SomethingAwful mods teamed up to bully an autistic kid to suicide, and scrubbed the forum of all evidence. Or that amusement park in Switzerland that employed a secret gang of zoophiles (they would allow people into the dolphin enclosure after dark to have sex with the dolphins). Most suffer from problems that make them unsuitable as stories. They’ve either been discussed to death so there’s nothing new to say, or they require extremely insular knowledge about the internal politics of some ancient web forum, or are just “incomplete”: we know part of the story but will never know the whole thing. It can be frustrating to read something that just stops, and lacks a proper ending (though this describes Aldapuerta…). It can be hard to find stories that are universally compelling yet haven’t already been told.
Comment by admin — 2023-12-12 @ 07:55