The Watcher and Other Stories (Harbrace Paperbound Library)

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The Watcher" is Communist party man Amerigo, a poll watcher in a highly conservative church district of hospitals, asylums, and convents where Italy's misfits and recluses have the vote thrust upon them. An amusing, lightly sardonic, barbed assault on self-perpetuating, self-sustaining establistments built by men but now attaining the untouchable elevation of a divine law.

Its individual scenes are striking: images of ants crawling all over the landscape, up the walls of the small house, around and in to the baby’s cradle; the poisoned neighbors who cannot stop laughing when talking about their ant treatment options, all of which are presumably dangerous chemicals; the genius tinkerer neighbor who would serve as a good interrogator in a different life; the Ant Man and his cowering ways.Amerigo knew all these stories and he felt no curiosity or amazement at them; he knew that a sad, nervous day was ahead of him; as he wandered in the rain, looking for the entrance number marked on the little card from City Hall, he felt he was stepping over the frontier of his world.

Italo Calvino's earlier works, like these three stories, were grounded in standard plots and standard character development. The neighbors show us some of the strategies people adapt to defeat their daily worries, but the truth is you'll never be able to do away with such worries entirely. I could see myself rereading this because there was so much to unpack in "The Watcher" that just one reading doesn't seem to do it justice. Its essence, Calvino demon strates, is that the labor of pes simistic optimists such as the Communist Ormea and the op timistic pessimists of the Church and the conservative political parties yields the possibility of a city grander and more hu mane than either the Cot tolengo complex or Turin itself.In the title story, an Italian Communist poll watcher is stationed at a hospital in Turin, where nuns guide the hands of invalids to their preferred candidate in a special election. The Watcher” is deeply polarizing because, though it contains some of the best of Calvino’s wit, style, and constantly evolving philosophical turns, it also has some language and thinking about disability that comes off as fascistic and even eugenicist at times. Calvino uses the asylum and its inhabitants a metaphor for democratic society and its odd creatures. And in "The Argentine Ant, " the citizens of a provincial seaside town struggle against a government-controlled infestation.