Fiction
Numbers In The Dark And Other Stories
By Italo Calvino. Pantheon. 276 pp. $24.
In "The Flash," one of the short fictions collected in "Numbers in the Dark," the narrator steps into the street in the middle of a crowd and suddenly discovers that "I understood nothing . . . I didn't understand the reasons for things or for people, it was all senseless, absurd. And I started to laugh." Everyday reality reasserts itself, but the narrator finds himself longing for another visitation, to once again "grasp that other knowledge, found and lost in an instant." His experience parallels the effect Italo Calvino's fiction can have on the reader: without warning other meanings, other forces, are revealed under the surface of our world.
In such distinctive works as "The Baron in the Trees," "Invisible Cities" and "The Castle of Crossed Destinies," Mr. Calvino unearthed and celebrated the uncanny, the remarkable, the mysterious. "Numbers in the Dark" gathers a variety of miscellaneous works -- fables, short stories, dramatic monologues, written between 1943, when Calvino was l9, and 1984. (Mr. Calvino died in 1985.) One of the surprises of the collection is that Mr. Calvino's distinctive style (droll, straightforward, exact in its descriptions) developed very early. Another is that much of his earliest work was overtly political, albeit a politics cloaked in fables.
Some of the pieces read like works dashed off and never picked up again (indeed, "The Queen's Necklace" is composed of the first pages of a novel Mr. Calvino began in the 1950s and put aside). Several of the short stories read like early versions of ideas Mr. Calvino would return to in his later, famous works of fiction. The pleasures here are the pleasures to be found in his 17 other volumes: an encounter with a profoundly original, humane, playful imagination, looking at the world with a fresh eye, inviting us to join him in a search for that nourishing "other knowledge" that lies somewhere just under the surface of the mundane world. "Numbers in the Dark" is a consistently entertaining and moving collection and a necessary addition to any Calvino admirer's shelf.
The Twilight of Common Dreams
WHY AMERICA IS WRACKED BY CULTURE WARS
By Todd Gitlin. Metropolitan Books/Henry Holt. 294 pp. $25.
"For a long time," Todd Gitlin writes, "an important part of being an American has been to take sides in culture wars over what it means to be an American." The problem with our obsession, Mr. Gitlin argues, is that "culture wars do not settle disputes." More importantly, they distract us from the critical problems we now face. What current and historical forces have led us to flay one another over questions of diversity and identity, ignoring such alarming phenomena as "the impoverishment of the cities"? Why do we allow increasingly vapid debates to drain away energies that could be applied to "the necessary discussion of what ought to be done about all the dying out there"?
Gitlin, a former president of the Students for a Democratic Society and the author of several works on recent American history, including "The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage," and "The Whole World is Watching: Mass Media in the Making and Unmaking of the New Left," is also clearly concerned by the fragmentation of the democratic left in America, its collapse into truculent special interest groups more concerned with agendas than with helping to generate "a vocabulary for the common good."
Surveying several decades of our recent past, Mr. Gitlin is persuasive and exact in identifying the origins of our unwillingness to deal with broad issues. If in the end his excavation of the sources of the failure of our society to address the true causes or inequality and violence is more persuasive than his suggestions for change, and if his indictment of current conditions seems to pin a disproportionate amount of the blame on the Right, "Twilight" is nonetheless a very useful book, carefully detailed, provocative and, finally quite loving. "Enough bunkers! Enough of the perfection of differences," Mr. Gitlin cries. "We ought to be building bridges."
