A young nobleman climbs up a tree in protest when his parents force him to try eating snails. Apart from most other kids who’ve done similar things, this child never comes down to the ground again. He lives the rest of his life in the trees, and makes a philosophy out of it. It is quite the flight of fantasy, this short novel set in northern Italy in the late 1700s. I particularly enjoy all the strange plays on historical events and personages, and young baron di Rondò and his lifestyle becomes an allegory of the life of the mind. It mirrors a lot of the intellectual trends of the time.
There is not much of a plot to talk about, it is rather slowly driven by different takes on ideas. Sometimes the narrative lags because of this overreliance on ideas, but as the writing is so light and easygoing, it doesn’t hinder the reading too much. The book was written over three months the summer when Calvino stopped participating in the Italian Communist Party, and the story mirrors his gradual disillusionment with the movement. I liked the book, despite its intermittent slow parts, and would like to see if the other two stories in the trilogy are as imaginative and fanciful (the other stories being “The Nonexistant Knight” and “The Cloven Viscount”).
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Kinship of all Species 