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I came to Calvino late. As a curious/voracious young adult I read If on a winter’s night a traveller, thought it pointless, and aside from fragments didn’t try him again for twenty years. The density, the language, the playful intellectualness � none of that was the problem. But I was a Borges fan and I demanded some heartshock with my mindgames � some dizzying vertigo or glimpse of the abyss. Whether, in other works, Calvino offers this I can’t say: since my two-decades hiatus I’ve read only Mr Palomar and a few stories from his much earlier Adam, One Afternoon (which seemed empty and over-slick and almost put me off all over again). But, perhaps owing to my mellowing with middle-age, I realise the fear and trembling stemming from Poe through Kafka to Borges is not the be-all and end-all � that, in light of my more recent love affair with his younger countryman Antonio Tabucchi, Calvino’s � at least in Mr Palomar � is in some ways a perfect temperament for me, so long as he’s balanced with grittier writers to offset his arch impersonality.

Reasons Mr Palomar suits my current state of mind:

1. It’s a travel-book, by an author who isn’t travelling. Or let’s say he’s travelling � to and from the shops, the zoo, the beach � but with the gaze of a visitor, a stranger, which makes of even his stepping outside to the garden a minor revelation.

2. It’s a meditation. It tempts us not (like Poe/Kafka/Borges) to search in dreams and fantasy for paradox, but to find it here, in the everyday: “‘It is only after you have come to know the surface of things,� he concludes, ‘that you venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface is inexhaustible.’�

3. It’s a writing-guide, a series of exercises, a catalogue. It bears testament to no extraordinary life of any kind, save the special skill in looking and describing possessed by its author. Like the late works of Beckett, it shows what can be cultivated in a void, at least as that term “void� applies to common forms of inspiration. Characters? Barely. Plot? None. “Drama� stemming from “experience� in the histrionic/melodramatic sense? Not at all. It makes of growing old, of “losing the fire�, of pottering in the garden � of all these things, a virtue.

All of this I need to hear and see and believe right now, when my young man’s wander- and experience-lust is no longer something I can integrate into my chosen lifestyle. That Mr Palomar is also episodic, discontinuous, made of 20+ (27, to be exact � 9x3) miniature fragments which speak to and enhance each other but are nevertheless self-contained � that too suits my current state of mind. With 12 (never more than 12; that way lies madness) part-finished books piled by my bedside, Mr Palomar is a powerful anchor, always reliable, its 27 prongs gripping deep into what is actual. To inhabit only its world might be a trial, even suffocating. This is a book for in-between states, for “also� moments. I’m reading Emma Tennant, Danilo Kis, Karapanou’s The Sleepwalker and also Mr Palomar. But in that “also� is the distinction of the other. In the world of books, too, Mr Palomar is a stranger. One of a kind.