Path to the Spiders’ Nests is the first novel of Italian author Italo Calvino (1923-1985); his other works include Invisible Cities and If On a Winter’s Night a Traveler. I’ve not read any of his works before, though they are readily available in English.
A short book, Spiders’ Nests is set in coastal Italy in the middle to late days of World War II. It does not have much of a storyline, a rather fabricated one actually, which serves as an anchor for several character studies. It does however have an extremely memorable main character: Pin, a pre-adolescent boy living with his prostitute sister, they have been orphaned by the death of their mother and abandonment by their father. The story covers about a week of Pin’s life as he is attempting to grow up in the nonfunctioning environment that constituted the Italian State and its coalition-of-convenience resistance movement. Wise beyond his years, Pin has little association with children his age, and is bewildered by adults … all adults. I kept thinking of Huckleberry Finn while reading this, yet Spiders’ Nests has a vastly different setting.
Because of Pin this is an interesting read, though the story is not near as interesting as the Wikipedia biography of its author (born in Cuba, moved to San Remo, Italy when he was 2, trained as an agronomist, his masters thesis was on Joseph Conrad).
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