Spectacles Mr. Palomar

By Paul Gray

Thanks to the time warp of translation, not all new books by Italo Calvino that appear in English are actually new. Both Marcovaldo (1983) and Difficult Loves (1984) offered short stories that the Italian author wrote more than two decades ago, when his talents were entertainingly restricted to earthly realities. Mr. Palomar, on the other hand, belongs to the later vintage of Calvino's fiction. Like such works as Cosmicomics (1968) and Invisible Cities (1974), this novel uses the recognizable world primarily as an excuse for the launching of antic metaphysics.

The hero emerges through a series of vignettes connected to one another only by his obsession. It is no accident that Mr. Palomar bears the name of a famous observatory, for he "has decided that his chief activity will be looking at things from the outside." This sounds easier than it proves to be, at least for someone of Mr. Palomar's temperament. For one thing, he can never be sure that he has correctly witnessed any phenomenon. His repeated attempts to view the "avalanche of simultaneous events that we call the universe" lead him to a pessimistic conclusion: "It is only after you have come to know the surface of things that you can venture to seek what is underneath. But the surface of things is inexhaustible."

This daunting insight does not keep the hero from continuing his lonely, alert vigil. He is convinced that should he ever, miraculously, see exactly what is going on in front of his eyes, he can begin the truly important part of his mission: "Extending this knowledge to the entire universe." So he goes on watching: a pair of mating tortoises, giraffes in a zoo, the cuts of meat in a butcher shop, the ruins of a Toltec shrine in Mexico, the flight of migrant starlings in his native Rome. Even while tending the grounds of his summer home, he feels the key to cosmic understanding within his reach: "He no longer thinks of the lawn: he thinks of the universe. He is trying to apply to the universe everything he has thought about the lawn."

It does not work, of course. But Calvino's narrative of this doomed quest succeeds admirably, in part because he, like Samuel Beckett, recognizes the comic possibilities inherent in the tailspin of logic toward the absurd. Mr. Palomar's relentless speculations render him buffoonish. Passing a woman sunbathing topless on a beach, he averts his eyes lest she cover herself and embarrass them both. On reflection, though, he decides that his behavior was incorrect, since it reinforced outmoded taboos against nudity. So he walks by again, this time taking in the bare breasts as an incidental feature in the general landscape. But that was wrong too, he concludes, because it denied the woman her humanity. A third try proves equally unsatisfactory, since his brief glance at the exposed bosom strikes him, in retrospect, as dismissive and paternalistic. It is during his fourth approach that the sunbather gets up and runs away.

When he looks at the stars, frantically shuffling his charts, eyeglasses and flashlight, Mr. Palomar attracts a knot of wondering spectators. His behavior in a Paris cheese store, drawing sketches of various brands, makes other customers shake their heads. The dedicated observer has become a spectacle.

Calvino's spare narrative seems to cry out for allegorical explanations. Mr. Palomar could represent the travail of Western empiricism, in which every new discovery adds to the inexplicable. Or he might represent the last gasp of a class (European, intellectual, well-to-do) that is being smothered by the rise of the masses. None of the possible interpretations seems as interesting as the novel's deceptively plain but beguiling language. The wise reader of Mr. Palomar might best adopt a strategy that the hero formulates but fails to follow: "Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see."