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Read Difficult Loves (1985)

Difficult Loves (1985)

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Rating
3.94 of 5 Votes: 1
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ISBN
0156260557 (ISBN13: 9780156260558)
Language
English
Publisher
mariner books

Difficult Loves (1985) - Plot & Excerpts

Cinta. Satu kata yang sangat luas maknanya. Cinta dapat dideskripsikan dengan berbagai bentuk atau cara. Ketika membicarakan cinta, kita tidak melulu terpaku pada logika, tetapi perasaan, naluri, dan hasrat juga berperan di dalamnya dan membentuk "sistem" interaksi sosial antara manusia yang satu dengan yang lainnya atau dengan lingkungan sekitarnya. Cinta memang kosmik dan epik, membaca kisah cinta pun menjadi sesuatu yang tak lekang waktu karena selalu ada sisi lain dari sekeping kata cinta. Sisi-sisi dari sebuah cinta inilah yang termuat dalam Gli Amori Difficuli (Difficult Loves), salah satu karya Italo Calvino. Calvino sendiri adalah salah satu sastrawan Italia yang paling berpengaruh pada abad 20. Gli Amori Difficuli merupakan kumpulan sebelas cerita pendek dan dua cerita panjang yang ditulis Calvino antara 1948-1957 dan berlatar Italia pada sekitar era fasisme. Awal ketertarikan saya membaca (dan membeli) buku ini adalah kurangnya pengetahuan dan referensi saya terhadap karya penulis Italia, karena sebelumnya bacaan saya hampir selalu penulis Inggris atau Amerika. Kalaupun ada yang lain seperti The Famished Road karya Ben Okri (Nigeria), novel itu ditulis (sebelum saya membaca terjemhannya) dalam bahasa Inggris atau karya sastra non-bahasa Inggris yang paling mudah ditemui seperti Leo Tolstoy (Rusia). Istimewanya, saya langsung menemukan perbedaan mencolok gaya bertutur Calvino dengan penulis-penulis lain. Ia kerap membuat satu paragraf yang sangat panjang dengan pendeskripsian yang agak bertele-tele. Calvino sangat memerhatikan detil latar pada ceritanya. Jujur saja, ada beberapa cerita dalam buku ini yang tidak saya pahami akhir kisahnya.Cerita pendek dalam Gli Amori Difficuli ini antara lain Petualangan Seorang Serdadu, Petualangan Seorang Pelancong, Petualangan Sepasang Suami Istri, Petualangan Seorang Pria Berkacamata, Petualangan Seorang Pembaca, Petualangan Seorang Penyair. Dua cerita panjang yang termuat dalam buku ini adalah Kabut Asap dan Terjuan ke Duni Real Estate. Semua cerita dalam buku ini menurut saya memiliki keunikan masing-masing dalam bicara tentang cinta. Misalnya dalam Petualangan Seorang Pembaca yang menjadi salah satu favorit saya, mengisahkan seorang pria kutu buku yang justru merasa bingung di saat ia bertemu wanita yang disukainya. Kebingungan itu disebabkan cintanya terbagi antara wanita yang ditemuinya dengan buku yang sedang dibacanya. Saya tak pernah tahu apakah ada tipe manusia macam ini, yang sangat mencintai buku sampai-sampai ia tetap tak mau melepaskan bacaan dari pikirannya bahkan saat ia tengah bercinta. Kisah cinta lainnya juga tak kalah menarik dan unik, dan yang paling saya sukai adalah Petualangan Sepasang Suami Istri. Ceritanya sederhana dan terinspirasi dari kehidupan nyata yang dapat kita temui dalam keseharian. Sepasang suami istri yang masing-masing bekerja dalam waktu yang berbeda. Sang suami harus bekerja pada malam hari dan baru pulang saat fajar menyingsing sementara si istri berangkat kerja dari pagi, tak lama setelah kepulangan suaminya dan pulang larut malam ketika suaminya bersiap berangkat kerja. Apa yang terjadi kemudian adalah kisah kerinduan yang melanda si suami maupun sitri ketika pasangannya bekerja. Sang istri selalu merasakesepian di saat ia pergi ke peraduan di malam hari, tak ada pria tercinta di sampingnya yang menemani lelap mimpinya. Begitu pun sang suami yang beristirahat tidur pada pagi hari hanya dapat menemukan bekas-bekas kehangatan di sisi ranjang yang ditiduri istrinya. Ia pun memilih untuk berbaring di sisi tersebut untuk meredam kerinduannya. Namun setiap mereka terbangun, mereka tahu bahwa yang akan temui adalah kesepian,kesepian, dan kesepian. Kisah lain yang juga menjadi favorit saya adalah Kabut Asap yang bertutur tentang kemunafikkan petinggi-petinggi pmerintah suatu kota dan para pengusaha dalam mengatasi polusi yang terjadi di kota itu akibat semakin berkembangnya industri modern yang merusak alam. Dikisahkan dari sudut pandang seorang editor pelaksana suatu majalah lingkungan, Kabut Asap menjadi bacaan fiksi kritis yang membuka mata bahwa ada banyak pihak yang bermain dalam kehidupan kita. Kecintaan terhadap pekerjaannya membuat si editor pelaksana kemudian menyisipkan beberapa pesan tersirat dalam tulisan-tulisannya meski harus beradu pendapat dengan atasannya yang juga seorang pengusaha yang munafik. Italo Calvino memberikan saya cakrawala baru dalam khasanah sastra Italia pada umumnya dan dunia ada khususnya. Cerpen-cerpen yang mengagkat tema kehidupan manusia sehari-hari dituturkan dengan teliti membuat pembacanya menyadari hal-hal yang selama ini dianggap sepele dalam kegiatan sehari-hariya. Ternyata hal-hal itu di tangan seorang Calvino dapat menjadi sebuah kisah unik yang sulit terlupakan.

Perhaps you are like me and always have a book. It is physical, the ledge we look over to the other, the real, world. And it is metaphysical, intertwining with our own existence, characters and plotlines merging from the page to the street, the office, the bedroom. Oh, it gets muddled. A tortured, drunken sleep, where one wonders if the conversation, the gaze, the regret was real; or did I dream it, did I read it.Amedeo Oliva always has a book. He took it to the beach. The book became every book, a constantly changing kaleidoscope, a picture carousel. He’d look up over that ledge, see the rocks, the greenish-blue water, the oblique dash of a crab. But they were only peeks. He looks down, always looks down, as the carousel turns, and Raskolnikov counts the steps that separate him from the old woman’s door; turns again, and Lucien de Rubempré gazes at the towers and roofs of the Conciergerie before sticking his head into the noose; turns again, and a cannonball falls at the feet of Prince Andrei; turns again, to a shop filled with engravings and statues where Frédéric Moreau, his heart in his mouth, was to meet the Arnoux family.Amedeo peeks again. A woman languishes on an air mattress, rolling down the twin pieces of her swimsuit to catch the sun. She waves, asks for a light for her cigarette. She does not move away when he touches her. Amedeo enters the water, troubled. And it turns again. How will this end? He obsesses. What will be the outcome with Albertine? Would Marcel find her again or not?Such is a day at the beach in The Adventure of a Reader. There are other Adventures here: of a Soldier; of a Bather; of a Clerk; of a Photographer; of a Traveler; of a Nearsighted Man; of a Poet. Twenty-eight stories in all, very simply told, like fables. There are stories of War and what happens after War. We walk through mine fields, and are taken as a partisan back to headquarters. A German soldier tries to take one animal after another from the Animal Woods. I have him in the sights of a rifle, and I am a very bad shot. It is relatively easy to break in to commit A Theft in a Pastry Shop; harder to leave.Looking up and looking down. What parts were real? I would like to think I would have put the book down when the other bathers left, unlike Amedeo, who made love to the woman in the cove while holding a finger in his ever-turning book, so he wouldn’t lose his place. But perhaps you are like me, and never really put the book down.

What do You think about Difficult Loves (1985)?

cosa c'è di tanto affascinante in un amore difficile? storie che finiscono nello stesso momento in cui avrebbero potuto iniziare, o che non iniziano mai. o storie che non sarebbero mai dovute cominciare. o storie che non riescono a finire. o tutte le infinite storie che sarebbero perfette, se il caso le facesse incontrare, e invece sono perse chissà dove?è davvero l'essenza stessa dell'amore, la difficoltà? o forse è il sogno, l'immaginazione di un futuro nel momento in cui ci si illude che possa davvero essere possibile? forse per questo mi affascinano tanto gli innamoramenti che durano pochi minuti, il tempo di una fermata di metropolitana, o di uno sguardo più lungo del tempo necessario a distoglierlo. when you gonna realize that it was just that the time was wrong, Juliet?
—Ilmatte

People will forget what you said People will forget what you did But people will never forget how you made them feel.You, Mr. Calvino! I’ll never forget how this book made me feel. An immensely gifted writer, Calvino displayed his genius in this collection by plucking the ignored or trivial fragments of moments we experience at one point or another in our lives and weaved them together to present these gems of short stories. How vividly he captured the minute happenings around us and served us some riveting tales makes me revered in awe of him.There is some confusion in regards to the edition of this book as I gathered from other reviews here that most of them have read the edition containing following four parts:Riviera Stories, Wartime stories, Post-war stories, and Stories of Love and Loneliness.Mine edition however has three sections namely: Difficult loves (Stories of Love and Loneliness), Smog and A Plunge into Real Estate.Difficult Loves is the highlight of this collection containing 11 short stories ranging between 4-10 pages and every single one of them wowed me by their brevity and impactful writing. And kindly don’t compare this book with Italo’s other works like If on a winters’ night…, or Invisible Cities. There is no wild imagination on display here but rather simple, accessible writing about simple people. With each story, Calvino gracefully unearths the most complicated emotions buried deep inside various characters and talks about loves that are difficult to embrace in the world driven by conventions and morals. A married woman desires to have a good time without her husband, a reader who wants to read, just read, a near-sighted man’s adventure to adjust and accept the inevitable changes a piece of accessory brought to his personality and consequently his life, a photographer who wants to capture every single moment in his camera, so on and so forth. The underlying theme remains the same. Love. Love for someone and for something and difficulty to proclaim that love and carrying on one’s life with or without such proclamation.Smog revolves around a man who re-locates to a different city which has for long been victimized of industrial pollution and how he got used to the so-called polluted air around him and consequently made him see the difference between human beings he had known for life and those whom he had known for a short period of time and how in the process he started noticing things he had long ignored throughout his life. Calvino has beautifully captured the love story between two characters which again is not according to the conventional standards of love. A passage I particularly liked:"In other words, I loved her. And I was unhappy. But how could she understood this unhappiness of mine? There are those who condemn themselves to the most gray, mediocre life because they have suffered some misfortune; but there are also those who do the same thing because their good fortune is greater than they feel they can sustain." A Plunge into Real Estate depicts the story of a family who in order to better their economic conditions gets involved in business with a real estate agent and how Quinto, the protagonist started experiencing the implication of material world in his life. This story in my opinion is a generalized take on Italian Economy during 1950’s in general and bourgeois class in particular but again it’s an engaging tale that entails that society builds character and shapes our beliefs in the most unlikely circumstances. Calvino lovingly carries his readers alongside him, and makes them experience the world through his words and makes them experience their own world through his creativity. After reading Difficult Loves, I can easily say that he’s one of the most versatile Writers I’ve read. An ideal companion, who understands you and makes you understand him by displaying virtuosity of a master story-teller.
—Garima

Calvino, è noto, è amante delle geometrie e del distacco ironico, più che dei melodrammi emotivi. E così, anche nell'affrontare i temi dei rapporti interpersonali, e in generale delle relazioni tra individuo e mondo, come fa in questa raccolta di racconti, Calvino predilige un approccio schematico, quasi formulaico, da 'parabola', evitando il più possibile i sentimentalismi per osservare ironicamente i suoi protagonisti da un punto di vantaggio. Per usare le parole dell'autore stesso nella nota introduttiva, 'dobbiamo concludere che se la novella era per lo scrittore ottocentesco una "fetta di vita", per lo scrittore d'oggi è anzitutto pagina scritta, un mondo in cui agiscono forze d'un ordine autonomo? [...] Diciamo piuttosto che costruendo una novella (cioè stabilendo un modello di relazioni tra funzioni narrative), lo scrittore mette in evidenza il procedimento logico che serve agli uomini per stabilire relazioni anche tra i fatti dell'esperienza.'Letteratura come griglia interpretativa della vita stessa, anzi come modello sul quale si presentano, in maniera semplificata ma simbolica, le strutture interpretative che applichiamo alla vita stessa (forse, vien da aggiungere, influenzati a nostra volta da strutture narrative incontrate in precedenza nella nostra vita di lettori, spettatori di cinema ecc...).Insomma, dietro alla semplicità di questi racconti, resi ancor più piacevoli dall'ironia pervasiva di molte di queste pagine, c'è anche l'esplicita volontà di cogliere alcuni elementi fondamentali del modo con cui diversi individui interagiscono con il mondo circostante, messo in evidenza da circostanze impreviste (l''avventura' del titolo di ogni racconto), sia essa la perdita degli slip in mare, la presenza di una bagnante nel raggio di visuale di un accanito lettore, o la perdita delle chiavi di casa da parte di una giovane moglie. I racconti, narrati prevalentemente dalla prospettiva del protagonista, evidenziano come le manie, le ossessioni personali siano il filtro tramite il quale ognuno di noi percepisce il mondo e le sue opportunità, ma soprattutto, nella maggior parte di questi racconti, le persone, nonchè potenziali amanti o spasimanti. Dal lettore che predilige l'ordine delle avventure letterarie agli imbarazzi dell'interazione reale ('Amedeo si sentiva in una condizione perfetta: la pagina scritta gli apriva la vera vita, profonda e appassionante, e alzando gli occhi ritrovava un casuale ma gradevole accostarsi di colori e sensazioni, un mondo accessorio e decorativo, che non poteva impegnarlo in nulla'), all'amante per cui l'emozione dell'incontro amoroso sta più nell'aspettativa avida e sognante cullata durante uno scomodo viaggio in treno che nell'incontro stesso, in molti di questi racconti la proiezione mentale prevale sulla realtà, che a confronto conta solo relativamente; la vera 'avventura' è quella che si svolge nella testa dei protagonisti. 'L'avventura di un fotografo', esplicitando il rapporto tra vita vissuta e sua rappresentazione, più o meno costruita e artificiosa, illustra bene questa dicotomia.La letteratura come campo di gioco dove lo scrittore fa muovere personaggi e riflette dinamiche del mondo reale è indubbiamente molto cara al Calvino maturo influenzato da Perec e Queneau. A mio avviso questa raccolta non solo anticipa questa fase più tarda della produzione calviniana, ma decisamente illustra le grandi risorse di questo tipo di letteratura, che non è mero gioco letterario, ma punta ad indagare precisi aspetti dell'interazione tra uomo e realtà, e delle strutture narrative e interpretative che spesso inconsapevolmente (e forse oggi, anche grazie a Calvino, meno inconsapevolmente) applichiamo al mondo e alla nostra stessa vita.
—Tiziana

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