Can I read Marcovaldo, or, The seasons in the city on EtoBox?

Marcovaldo, or, The seasons in the city by Calvino, Italo is a work of fiction available to read on EtoBox.

What is Marcovaldo, or, The seasons in the city about?

Review In their first English translation and US publication: 20 short sketches written in the early 1950s and mid-1960s, all featuring the hapless aspirations of Marcovaldo, a father, husband, and unskilled laborer in a northern Italian city. With sly wit and utter economy, Calvino satirizes the drabness of the impoverished 1950s, the hollowness of the "booming" 1960s - yet never settles for easy targets or sentimentality, much preferring the ambivalence of whimsy. Thus, Marcovaldo may be forever yearning for the simpler, pastoral pleasures - and Calvino sympathizes - but his dreamy quests almost always have an under-cutting, wry outcome. With "an eye ill-suited to city life," for instance, Marcovaldo is overjoyed to spy mushrooms sprouting on a city street ("something could still be expected of life, beyond the hourly wage. . . with inflation index"); but this bucolic miracle leads only to a stomach-pump at the local hospital. Likewise, Marcovaldo has little luck with schemes to enjoy the night air, to feast on roast woodcock, to adopt a rabbit, to get his fish direct from the river. Nor, on the other hand, do his attempts at entrepreneurship - offering wasp-sting treatments (fo

Who reads Marcovaldo, or, The seasons in the city?

Author

Calvino, Italo

Publisher

Minerva

Published

1983

Language

EN

ISBN

9780436082726

Category

work of fiction

Subjects

Literary Fiction, Romance, Fiction

Rating

4.3 / 5 (211 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14