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PARALLEL WORLDS

Most peculiar this Fable. Or at least its beginnings.

It baffled me that after the initial proposition, the notion of a young nobleman exiling himself to live in the trees of his family’s estate--a proposition that has a great deal of charm and immediately captivates the reader--, a fair amount of the early part of the novel is devoted at making the unlikely believable, and the unbelievable likely.

For the ordered and systematic transposition of the life on the ground onto its parallel life in the trees made me wonder whether the initial idea was becoming less and less lofty.

Unquestionably, the novel never stopped being a great pleasure to read. Calvino’s prose (in translation, but I like to remind myself that Spanish and Italian are sister languages) is sheer delight. Clear and balanced sentences rich in imaginative detail. But the undoing of the doing � the bringing down to the ground what had been raised above it, or rather, the raising of the ground until the higher branches seemed just another ground, perplexed me.

That is until suddenly the magic of the allegory crystalized in my mind: Cosimo, the young nobleman, as the writer, as the creator of his own world, keeping a separate existence but never forgetting the world from which he originates and which he never stops observing. Life in parallel worlds.

With this interpretation, the setting of the story during the Enlightenment received a new glow for me too. I had been noting the various references: Paul Et Virginie; La nouvelle Héloïse. Tome I; Montesquieu; Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Lady; Henry Fielding. All mentioned with enthusiasm. Cosimo lived in the century of Utopias.

But this novel reminds us that absolutism followed the epoch of ideas, and that Cosimo’s parallel world, like most utopias, can dissolve.

What was Calvino trying to tell us about his world?