Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

First published:Palomar, 1983 (English translation, 1985)

Type of work: Psychological meditations

Time of work: The 1980’s

Locale: Europe, Japan, and Mexico

Principal Character:

• Mr. Palomar, who lives in Rome with his wife and daughter

The Novel

Mr. Palomar is a group of twenty-seven mostly benign meditations on—or, more accurately, observations of—the natural world. There is no connected story line, though the novel culminates in the death of the central character, yet each thoughtful vignette does proffer some insight via Palomar himself. These are the observations of a man temperamentally unsuited for any scientific enterprise, anguished over the disconnectedness he feels between himself and the rest of the universe, and eager to discover some appropriate relationship. The reader is also part of that alien universe, since the only access to Mr. Palomar is through the third-person narrative; the reader is the observer of the observer.

It is left to the reader to notice a thematic index at the conclusion of the novel. Italo Calvino explains that each chapter contains various admixtures of three themes, and that its position in the index indicates the proportion. Primarily visual descriptions are indicated by “1”; those chapters which are most narrative are labeled “2”; “3” indicates speculative meditation. Each of the three major divisions of the book (“1. Mr. Palomar’s Vacation”; “2. Mr. Palomar in the City”; and “3. The Silences of Mr. Palomar”) is further divided into three groups of three chapters. The first chapter (labeled 1.1.1., “Reading a Wave”) is ostensibly the most visually oriented. The sixth chapter (1.2.3., “The Infinite Lawn”) is a mixture of description, story, and meditation. The fifth chapter of the second division (2.2.2., “The Cheese Museum”) is mostly narrative, and the final chapter of the third division (3.3.3., “Learning to Be Dead”) is the most speculative.

Is this index descriptive or prescriptive? If the former, there is after all a kind of movement in the novel, as if, in fits and starts, Mr. Palomar finds that he needs more and more abstract speculation to achieve harmony with the universe. In “Serpents and Skulls” (3.1.2.), Mr. Palomar visits the remains of a pre-Columbian civilization in Mexico. His unnamed Mexican friend spins artful tales of the god Quetzalcoatl while nearby a group of schoolchildren is told by their instructor that, though the ancient carvings can be described and even dated, no one knows what they mean. Mr. Palomar observes that somehow his friend has translated mere descriptions (facts) into something living (meaning). Mr. Palomar sees in himself “the need to translate, to move from one language to another, from concrete figures to abstract words, to weave and reweave a network of analogies. Not to interpret is impossible, as refraining from thinking is impossible.” When Mr. Palomar considers his own place in the universe, mere observation is not enough.

If the index is prescriptive, it may be that Calvino is having a little joke on his own creation. In the third section of the book, the twenty-fifth chapter is entitled “The World Looks at the World” (3.3.1.). In this meditation Mr. Palomar realizes that his own ego is preventing him from seeing what the world wants him to see. He determines to become the eyes of the world, by an act of will observing everything from “outside.” Yet nothing changes, and Mr. Palomar begins to understand that in order for meaning to occur, “From the mute distance of things a sign must come, a summons, a wink: one thing detaches itself from the other things with the intention of signifying something....” At some unforeseen moment, some part of the universe must want to be seen just at the time Mr. Palomar is looking. The joke here is that in Mr. Palomar’s anguish to find meaning and connection for his life, the author of the story has been precisely ordering and juxtaposing events and making connections (“signifying something”), of which poor Mr. Palomar seems all too unaware.

Mr. Palomar begins quietly enough with Mr. Palomar on the beach, observing the waves, trying to take in all there is to see of a small portion of the waterfront, and, having looked, to move on to yet other patches of the beach. The waves have been looked at, but they do not divulge their meaning. What is vexing for Mr. Palomar is not the change in the waves, but that for him to comprehend what he is seeing he must understand himself as a particular person watching the waves and then interpret this understanding, which in turn must become part of a larger system interpreting the interpretation. At another time, watching an albino gorilla in the Barcelona Zoo grasp a rubber tire,

Mr. Palomar feels he understands the gorilla perfectly, his need for something to hold tight while everything eludes him, a thing with which to allay the anguish of isolation,...of the sentence of being always considered a living phenomenon.... We all turn in our hands an old, empty tire through which we try to reach some final meaning, which words cannot achieve.

The third and final major section of the novel, “The Silences of Mr. Palomar,” is in effect Mr. Palomar’s working out of the lesson learned from the gorilla. The world has little need for Mr. Palomar’s words and can get along just as well without them, and without him. Therefore he will withdraw his attention from the world, acting as if he were dead. This has the beneficial effect of providing Mr. Palomar with an absolute to hold on to, namely himself-as-dead, unchanging, and unchanged by the prickly interactions with the rest of the universe. In his silence Mr. Palomar will have himself: an old, empty tire. By drawing the end of his life, Mr. Palomar can then begin to catalog the collection of each of his life experiences. Since he was unable to place bounds on the universe and catalog its moments, he will turn to himself as a project. His inner architecture will be fixed as he learns to be dead, and his catalog will in the end provide the text for a full understanding of himself. Yet only a living Mr. Palomar can catalog himself. Pressed with the paradox of the same person being both living observer (ever changing as he observes his own observations) and an unchanging, bounded object, Mr. Palomar dies.

The Characters

Mr. Palomar lives with his wife, identified only as Mrs. Palomar, and unnamed daughter in Rome. He is a kind of urban Everyman who becomes increasingly worried over the rather tenuous connection between him and the rest of the world. Mr. Palomar himself is a nervous and anxious man, by turns haughty, evenhanded, and depressive, doubtful of his own significance, caught up in his own interior monologue. He wears glasses to correct myopia and ironically trusts only his own limited eyesight to provide certitude in a frenzied world. Even the ability of science to provide certainty must be doubted: Science cannot explain the most common of natural events, the migration of starlings.

Palomar, edgy and absentminded, introverted and fickle, is presented in the novel not as a fleshed-out individual, but rather as a collection of moods and attitudes, whose passion lies in making collections. He groups a blackbird’s song into trills, whistlings, and gurgles; he sees his lawn as a collection of this blade and that weed, and the universe as a collection of galaxies, dust particles, and force fields. He observes a flock of starlings, the foods in a Paris gourmet store, and he draws and measures the cheeses in a cheese shop, attempting to place each kind of cheese in some kind of context: historical, social, psychological. He thinks of the cheese shop as a dictionary.

Yet when Palomar observes the waves, the animals at the zoo, or the planets and stars, definitions fail him because there, unlike the manufactured cheeses, there is no history, no biography. The stars will not yield up their secrets; they can only be observed and cataloged. Palomar knows that is not enough. Somehow he must move from the surface of things to their interpretation. This is humorously expressed in the second meditation in the book, “The Naked Bosom” (1.1.2.), as Mr. Palomar repeatedly passes a sunbather who has bared her breasts. He is striving to achieve just the right kind of glance; averting his eyes would be to acquiesce in overzealous prudery, yet viewing the bared bosom as he would view a sand dune or an ocean wave is to do disservice to the significance of the female breast. Finally, certain that he has achieved a “detached encouragement,” Palomar once again crosses near the woman, who promptly leaves in a huff.

Mr. Palomar would like nothing better than to deduce the meaning of his own life, but his first principles, or axioms, are hazy at best. All of his models of reality disintegrate until he must face reality directly, and with that his inability to give it order or to explain it.

Critical Context

Mr. Palomar was the last novel published by Calvino before his death in 1985. In one sense, it harks back to a realism present in his first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947; The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1956), but in structure it is more closely related to the tales-within-tales of Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore (1979; If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, 1981) and the mathematical arrangement of Le citta invisibili (1972; Invisible Cities, 1974). As Calvino wrote in 1976, explaining his earlier turn away from social realism toward tales of allegorical fantasy and scientific wit, such as in Le cosmicomiche (1965; Cosmicomics, 1968), “now we can no longer neglect the fact that books are made of words, of signs, of methods of construction. We can never forget that what books communicate often remains unknown to the author himself,...that in any book there is a part that is the author’s and a part that is a collective and anonymous work.” It is not for literature to express a political order or even to teach the values of society; rather, literature must bring something new into the world by a partnership with the reader in co-creation. Calvino is widely recognized as one of the great modern writers, in the stream of Jorge Luis Borges, Stanislaw Lem, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Like Palomar, Calvino left a wife and daughter at his death. Locations in Mr. Palomar—the beach, the apartment in Rome, the Paris shops—were Calvino haunts. It is tempting to count the novel as autobiography, and the last chapter, “Learning to Be Dead,” as Calvino’s envoi. Yet it would be more fitting to say that, while Calvino evoked Mr. Palomar’s aspects within himself, new directions surely lay ahead for his creative insight. Calvino’s literary legacy is difficult to characterize, but that too is fitting. Only through time, as readers are provoked into making connections within the gaps left by the novelist, will the fruit of his labors be realized. For Mr. Palomar, “Before, by ‘world’ he meant the world plus himself; now it is a question of himself plus the world minus him.” This may well describe Calvino’s estate. It is in his precarious silences that he is most profound.

Sources for Further Study

Adler, Sara Maria. Calvino: The Writer as Fablemaker, 1979.

Andrews, Richard. “Italo Calvino,” in Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy: A Collection of Essays, 1984. Edited by Michael Caesar and Peter Hainsworth.

Calvino, Italo. The Uses of Literature, 1986.

Carter, Albert Howard. Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy, 1987.

Library Journal. CX, September 15, 1985, p. 91.

The London Review of Books. VII, October 3, 1985, p. 17.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. October 6, 1985, p. 3.

New Statesman. CX, September 27, 1985, p. 34.

The New York Times Book Review. XC, September 29, 1985, p. 1.

Newsweek. CVI, October 21, 1985, p. 80.

The Observer. December 2, 1984, p. 19.

Publishers Weekly. CCXXVIII, August 9, 1985, p. 63.

Time. CXXVI, September 23, 1985, p. 81.

Washington Post Book World. XV, September 22, 1985, p. 5.