I read this as a teenager, and decided to re-read now. It’s a story about the Italian partigiani, the people who fought against the nazi and fascist forces towards the end of world war two.
The author, Italo Calvino, actually was part of the resistenza, and he wrote this book from a place of deep emotion. Famously, he wrote the first edition and published it in 1947 but was very unhappy with it, so he reworked it hard, and added a preface which is, in some ways, more interesting than the book itself.
But I like the book, even if it’s different from the “rarefied” vibe of the latter Calvino, of Invisible Cities and the likes, which I love. I like it cause it’s partly a fairy tale, and partly a story about a child like the great classics of children literature, but it’s, also a story of war, of politics, and a story about the Italian people under the Fascist regime.
The book tells the story of a child, Pin, who ends up involved with the partisans by sheer chance. The story is told, for the most part, through the eyes of a kid who has had to deal too much with grown up topics, and does not really understands them.
I think one my favorite bits is when he hears the word GAP, and has to fake knowing what he means, and then tries to ask another kid, and when the kid does not know it either, he takes the chance to mock him brutally.
This feels a deeply true representation of how kids can be both innocent and cruel, and something that may have well happened for real. The same is true for most of the book.
Calvino wrote Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno with the intent to memorialize his comrades, while at the same time fighting the two tendencies in Italian culture to both trivialize the partigiani and to make them into flawless saints.
He goes against the latter part by showing how partisans could be reprehensible, unlikeable, and in some cases ended up on the side of “good” by chance, just like many of those who ended up with the fascist black shirts did that for a variety of reasons, and often by accident.
This seems pretty obvious now, but the reduction to black and white of the Italian civil war is very common, and it was very much so back when this book was written.
To counter the other argument, Calvino has a random character go on a tirade which is both weak and preachy. I think this is the part he regrets the most, and which most readers and critics will like the least.
But this bit conveys a very important message, if a simple one: there were good and bad people on both sides, and both sides did bad things and good. But there is a fundamental difference which will forever distinguish those who fought in the resistenza, and those who fought for the nazi-fascism: one side was fighting for the right version of the world, and the other was not.
Surprisingly, this book is very much loved by Italian readers, but it seems to be universally considered mediocre in reviews by english speakers I could find online. I wonder if this may have to do with the translation, or with a difference in the cultural context. Still, I think it’s a good book, and a short one, and you should read it.
Vote: 7.5/10, I wish we got one more rewrite.
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