SOURCE: “A Predilection for Fantasy,” in Calvino: The Writer as Fablemaker, Studia Humanitatis, 1979, pp. 21–53.

In the following essay from her full-length study of Calvino's work, Adler organizes his fantasy stories into classifications, emphasizing the “wide spectrum of fanciful variations of each one of these categories.”

An analysis of Italo Calvino's works can appropriately begin with a panorama of his versatile imagination. An outline of the subject matter which characterizes the author's inventive spirit has already been given. What is important to examine in this chapter, however, is the wide spectrum of fanciful variations of each one of these categories.

War Stories

In his early period, Calvino used the theme of man in relation to a war-ravaged society time and again. Yet, as the following examples will show, this theme undergoes a sequence of fanciful transformations.

“Il bosco degli animali,”¹ the story of a peasant's desperate attempts to save...