A fantasy/farce by the master. Set in Italy around the time of Napoleon, a young man, discouraged by his boring relationship with his two crazy parents, crazy sister, friar/tutor and crazy uncle who lives with them, “takes to the trees” of the surrounding forest at age twelve and never touches the ground again, dying at age 65. Like an overly long joke, I wondered how long Calvino could pull off this story and keep it interesting, but he does it successfully for more than 200 pages.The Barn’s li...

Rating: 4* of fiveThe Publisher Says: Cosimo, a young eighteenth-century Italian nobleman, rebels by climbing into the trees to remain there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an arboreal existence and even has love affairs.My Review: This being a famous and well-studied book, I suppose the publisher didn't feel the need to do a sell-job on it. That little squib is barely a log-line!I read this book first in ~1974, because it had a cool-looking jacket. It also had an Italian auth...

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

That's when love makes you climb trees and come down only to put you (very momentarily) at the feet of your beloved.Between a philosophical tale and Munchausen-style adventures, this admirably written book is devoured from cover to cover. A sort of Italian Voltaire, Calvino highlights the spirit of enlightenment here through the somewhat hysterical story of a man from the end of the 18th century who, after his childhood, will only live in the trees.This book is also a lovely tribute to trees! We...

This Italo Calvino (Italy) came recommended to me from Karl Ove Knausgaard (Norway). It was unusual in that it was a fantasy for adults--the story of a boy who gets angry with his parents and instead of going to his room, goes to his trees. And stays there. For life.Sound like the Swiss Family Robinson? In a way, but they came down to earth. He never does. Instead, like St. Exupéry's Little Prince on his Even Littler Planets, Cosimo remains "out there." In fact, he becomes downright primate-like...

The Baron in the Trees reads like a fairy-tale, but one with modern touches that include sophisticated satire and parody. In a nutshell, this novel is a story of a young baron who decides to live in the trees. The novel itself is narrated by the younger brother of the baron Cosimo. Besides describing Cosimo to us, the narrator does a great job of portraying his family members and other characters as well. Cosimo, the hero of the book, climbs a tree after having quarreled with his father, vowing

Some time ago Audible offered for free a number of books originally written in languages other than English. (If I recall correctly, it was a promotion in support of International Reading Day.) Of those I selected from the list, The Baron in the Trees has easily been the most enjoyable.To begin, this edition is a success on all counts - the writing is brilliant, the translation fluid, and the narration perfectly attuned to the text. It can easily be read and enjoyed simply as an amusing fable of...

This was my eleventieth Calvino, and it gets mighty close to being my favourite, that however, will likely always remain Invisible Cities, but this wondrous effort is comfortably perched on the second branch down from the top of the Calvino tree. It was such sheer joy to read! brimming with charm and delight from start to finish, who else but Calvino could have conjured up such a fantastical tale of an eighteenth century Baron living in the trees, without ever stepping foot on the ground again.

"(..) surrounding buds of phrases with frameworks of leaves and clouds, then interweaving again, and so running on and on and on until it splutters and bursts into a last senseless clusters of words, ideas, dreams, and so..."Once upon a time, somewhere between the innocence of childhood and the pluck of the bold rebel, a young Italian nobleman called Cosimo exercised his right to dissent after twelve long years of abiding by the inherent societal norms of his aristocratic title and refused to e

On 15 June 1767, Cosimo, 12-year-old son of an Italian aristocrat living in stately semi-reclusion in Ombrosa, near Genoa, takes to the trees of the vast family park as a protest against paternal discipline. He lives there, without touching ground, for the rest of his days. This being that sylvan age when Europe was so covered with trees that "a monkey could have left Rome and skipped from tree to tree till it reach Spain, without ever touching earth." The story teeters on the edge of farce. Ear...

73rd book of 2020.This is my sixth Calvino now, and the second book in Our Ancestors - his triptych of tales. I'll go out and say it straight away: this is going in my Favourites shelf.This novel reflects the beauty of nature, of literature itself, of solitude, and love all wrapped in Calvino's wondrous language and gentle philosophy. The somewhat whimsical lover in me has always been drawn to the plot of this novel. It is a conte philosophique about a twelve year old boy, son of a Baron, decide...

120119: of calvino’s work this is possibly my favorite. on reflection, i think this is because it seems effortless, is not illustration, manifestation, argument, of any kind of literary ‘game’. rather than exploring connection and pleasure of the text through genres, as If on a Winter's Night a Traveler. there is perhaps some poetic structure of which i am not aware, there is certainly commentary on ideals/idols of the ‘enlightenment’, some fun with plausible/absurd correspondence with thinkers

I reread after many years "The Baron in the trees", the second novel of the trilogy "Our ancestors", after having just reread the first, "The Cloven Viscount", and after this I will read the third, The Nonexistent Knight. I have a good memory of when I first read them as a teenager and I am curious to see how I will find them now, as an adult.The plot is set in the eighteenth century and is narrated in first person by Biagio, the protagonist's brother, that is Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò (without a...