New Yorker Fiction Review #200: "The Adventure of a Skier" by Italo Calvino



Review of a short story from the July 3, 2017 issue of The New Yorker...

As an American of Italian descent, and a self-proclaimed man of letters, I am ashamed to admit that this is the very first thing I've ever read by Italo Calvino, an Italian writer who, at the time of his death in 1985 (so I just learned), was the most translated Italian contemporary writer.

When I read a story like this one -- short, beautiful, ethereal, almost magical, and totally lacking in any kind of plot -- it makes me reflect very seriously on my own writing, in a way that would take pages and pages to properly unfold. So I won't get into it right now, but...

In this story, Italo Calvino basically takes us for an hour's trip on the ski slopes of some region in northern Italy where, through the eyes of a pack of younger teenage boys, then narrowed down to one in particular, we watch a delightful vision of a young woman skiing alongside them. She remains at a distant remove until one of the boys happens to end up on the ski lift with her. Next to her, he realizes she is quite normal, but her grace and power on the slopes speaks to him at another level. This story is worth reading if for no other reason than Calvino's description of the young woman skiing. It's just incredible writing.

I view a story like this as what a visual artist might call a study or a detail. In and of itself, it is not a complete work of art; however, it captures something -- a person or a moment -- in a beautiful way. I would be curious to find out where a story like this fits into Italo Calvino's whole body of work, because I'm guessing it occupies a rather minor place overall, but that he did a lot of these kinds of short pieces. They remind me of Palm of the Hand Stories, by Yasunari Kawabata. Stories that are almost like prose poems; they are not cars that take you from one place to the next. Instead they are like tiny jewels. They do not need to serve a function. They simply exist.

The reason stories like this make me reflect on my own writing is because I think somewhere along the line I used to aspire to write this kind of literature. I don't know if I never tried very hard at it, but at some point I gave it up. I even gave up thinking about life in these kinds of terms. My art, like my life, became more functional and more purpose driven over the years. But when I read something like this, it makes me think back to the days when I did not believe writing or life always had to be that way.

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