"Path to the Spider's Nest" by Italo Calvino

As one of the most translated Italian authors of all time at the time of his death, Italo Calvino is probably best known for his writing of the Oulipo Movement being an Italian in a mainly French literary genre.

Born in Cuba in 1923, Italo Calvino was no more than a toddler when he and his parents returned to Italy during the Mexican Revolution. As a child, he was a fan of Rudyard Kipling's seminal The Jungle Book and felt himself to be different to other people already. He also recalled seeing a man in a Marxist shirt get savagely beaten by a group of Mussolini supporters as being one of his first actual memories of childhood.

The Path to the Spider's Nest was his debut novel written in 1947 - when Italo Calvino himself was just twenty four years' old. The critics were initially at odds with this work calling it many things along the lines of ordinary, whereas others thought it was exceptional in its complexity.

It is about a young boy called Pin who is searching for his belonging in the world. He lives with his sister and he amuses people at a bar in his spare time. He steals a Nazi's pistol and then hides it all the while he is entirely driven by his ideas of trust and distrust in his attempts to see why adults, as they are will always be completely untrustworthy. It is stated in the text that:

“Grown-ups are an untrustworthy, treacherous lot, they don't take their games in the serious wholehearted way children do, and yet they too have their own games, one more serious than the other, one game inside another, so that it's impossible to discover what the real one is.” - The Path to the Spider's Nest

Stating that adults are always playing games, Pin tries to play a game of his own. As he searches different Italian groups to be a part of, especially in the political world, he does not know people are laughing at him and are mocking him. However, Pin has a secret of his own in which he can only entrust one adult with - and that is the adult that can win his complete trust. In this game, Pin serves as the dominant, the idea of the adult-young person heirarchy has been changed and therefore, the novel descends into near madness. It is a brilliantly clever book from which Italo Calvino definitely builds some of his later works, especially If On the Winter's Night a Traveler.

The theme of trust is massive in The Path to the Spider's Nest and has prime importance in other works by the same author. My personal favourite Calvino novel is this one and that is mainly because we get to see his most primitive works and where they came from. A lot of Calvino's works can be traced back to some place in this novel, especially aspects of the slightly trickster type character who works on the idea that adults state that it is wrong to lie and yet do it themselves all the time.

When I first read this, I was probably twenty three or twenty four years' old. I had read countless books by Italo Calvino by then and yet, this one has still always stood out in my memory possibly because it is the most fun one of them all. The character of Pin does not take himself too seriously because technically, he's still a kid compared to the other people in the book. But then again, he doesn't take the adults seriously either because he knows that they are cheaters and liars.

It is a very fun book of course, but it also exposes the world of lies that adults seem to live in. When adults tell children what to do and what not to do, they could not be practicing all of those rules themselves and so, Italo Calvino shows us how farcicle our world actually is.

A brilliant book and considerable the least read of Calvino's entire collection of novels, this text has resonated with me since I first read it. The idea of trust is strong and yet, the idea of distrust is even stronger.