This is late Calvino in archive mode—stories spanning decades, many of them brief, odd, and structurally playful without announcing themselves as such. You get early fables, wartime fragments, and later pieces where narrative starts to thin into pattern and idea.

Even when the story dissolves into abstraction, it never feels obscure. There’s always a clean line of thought underneath—about systems, chance, language, and the quiet absurdity of human behaviour. Less a “collection” than a map of how a writer learns to think. 

I love Calvino, he is one of my favourite writers.