The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday by Italo Calvino
David Ian Paddy

Italo Calvino, ed. Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday. Trans. Alfred Mac Adam. Pantheon, 1997. 588 pp. $30.00.

Originally collected in two volumes in 1983 in Italy, Calvino’s Fantastic Tales, available for the first time in English and in one volume, is a wondrous guide for getting lost, showing us through a land that at first seems like solid, empirical reality, but always ends in a bizarre transformation of the expected.
In some ways the tales selected and the introductions written by Calvino can function as an illustrated source book for Tzvetan Todorov’s seminal study The Fantastic. Calvino cites Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as a mode of fiction in which the reader and, usually, the protagonist confront a supernatural intrusion into the real and remain uncertain whether this incredible event, say the appearance of a ghost, is an actual but inexplicable occurrence or a natural and explainable phenomenon, perhaps a hallucination. If the event can be regarded as either natural or supernatural, then it is not technically fantastic. The fantastic is that which sustains and depends on uncertainty. Todorov concludes his study by saying that the fantastic is fundamentally a nineteenth-century genre, and Calvino’s collection concurs with this by beginning with Jan Potocki’s “The Story of the Demoniac Pacheco” (1805) and ending with H. G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind” (1899), with the likes of Hoffmann, Dickens, Nerval, and Bierce occupying the ground in between.
Aside from offering the simple joy of reading about necrophilia, talking dolls, and a nose that leaves its owner, this collection of tales encourages readers to see the profound influence fantastic literature has had on much of the experimental tradition of the twentieth century. The transgressive, magical, and fantastic realism of Kafka, Borges, Pynchon, Angela Carter, Milorad Pavic, Kathy Acker, Alasdair Gray, Delany, García Márquez, Allende, Rushdie, and, of course, Calvino himself, has roots in this literature that tests the boundaries between fantasy and realism. Published two years before his death, Calvino’s collection provides a glorious ensemble of some of the best tales from the last century. It also serves as a key to Calvino’s own work (especially The Baron in the Trees, Cosmicomics, and Invisible Cities), and ultimately illuminates a backdrop for the imaginary explorations of twentieth-century literature. [David Ian Paddy]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday by Italo Calvino David Ian Paddy Italo Calvino, ed. Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday. Trans. Alfred Mac Adam. Pantheon, 1997. 588 pp. $30.00. Originally collected in two volumes in 1983 in Italy, Calvino’s Fantastic Tales, available for the first time in English and in one volume, is a wondrous guide for getting lost, showing us through a land that at first seems like solid, empirical reality, but always ends in a bizarre transformation of the expected. In some ways the tales selected and the introductions written by Calvino can function as an illustrated source book for Tzvetan Todorov’s seminal study The Fantastic. Calvino cites Todorov’s definition of the fantastic as a mode of fiction in which the reader and, usually, the protagonist confront a supernatural intrusion into the real and remain uncertain whether this incredible event, say the appearance of a ghost, is an actual but inexplicable occurrence or a natural and explainable phenomenon, perhaps a hallucination. If the event can be regarded as either natural or supernatural, then it is not technically fantastic. The fantastic is that which sustains and depends on uncertainty. Todorov concludes his study by saying that the fantastic is fundamentally a nineteenth-century genre, and Calvino’s collection concurs with this by beginning with Jan Potocki’s “The Story of the Demoniac Pacheco” (1805) and ending with H. G. Wells’s “The Country of the Blind” (1899), with the likes of Hoffmann, Dickens, Nerval, and Bierce occupying the ground in between. Aside from offering the simple joy of reading about necrophilia, talking dolls, and a nose that leaves its owner, this collection of tales encourages readers to see the profound influence fantastic literature has had on much of the experimental tradition of the twentieth century. The transgressive, magical, and fantastic realism of Kafka, Borges, Pynchon, Angela Carter, Milorad Pavic, Kathy Acker, Alasdair Gray, Delany, García Márquez, Allende, Rushdie, and, of course, Calvino himself, has roots in this literature that tests the boundaries between fantasy and realism. Published two years before his death, Calvino’s collection provides a glorious ensemble of some of the best tales from the last century. It also serves as a key to Calvino’s own work (especially The Baron in the Trees, Cosmicomics, and Invisible Cities), and ultimately illuminates a backdrop for the imaginary explorations of twentieth-century literature. [David Ian Paddy]

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