Numbers in the Dark
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0544146425
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Written between 1943 and 1984, the stories in Numbers in the Dark span the career of one of fiction’s modern masters: from Italo Calvino’s earliest fables, to tales informed by life in World War II–era Italy, to the delightful experimentation that would define his later work. Here are speculative stories on life in the digital age, genre-bending wonders, and “impossible interviews” with the likes of Montezuma and a Neanderthal. Deftly translated by Tim Parks, Numbers in the Dark shows off Calvino’s lifelong gift for subtle humor and shimmering philosophical insight.
“Numbers in the Dark is a glorious grab-bag . . . [with] enough gems from every phase in Calvino’s career to make it feel indispensable.” — Seattle Times
Sicily (DK Eyewitness Travel Guide)
Lidia Cooks from the Heart of Italy: A Feast of 175 Regional Recipes
Puppetmasters: The Political Use of Terrorism in Italy
skull. He came to understand it all when he found himself with the Germans just beneath him climbing the road to the Goletta and firing their flamethrowers into the bushes. Stretched out on the ground, he started to fire shot after shot and he understood why he was doing it. He understood that those men down there were the militiamen who had arrested him because his papers weren’t in order, they were the Todt guards marking down his hours, they were the orderly who made him clean the latrines,
managed to shave off every superfluous blip and adjust the rhythm of his asthma to that of his work with perfect precision. Even his eyes moved along trajectories as precise as the stars, since every machine demanded a particular sequence of glances to check that it didn’t seize up and lose him his bonus. After the first half–hour’s work Pietro was already tired, the factory noises blended in his eardrums into a single background hum with the combined rhythm of his four machines pulsing above.
and lethal sky, as once we read our destiny in the serene trajectories of the stars, the wandering comets. The only thing people talk about in our tribe now are guided missiles, while we are still going about armed with crude axes and spears and blowpipes. Why worry? We are the last village at the edge of the jungle. Nothing is going to change here, until the Great Day of the prophets dawns. Yet even here these are no longer the times when a white 123 Numbers in the Dark merchant would
just create a ‘noise’ effect. The Roessler boarding–house operation is the first practical experiment the diabolical insurance agent has attempted. Once the disaster has taken place, Skiller will go to another computer, whose programmer is ignorant of all the facts, to check if it is possible to trace consequence back to cause. Skiller will give this second programmer all the necessary data together with a certain amount of ‘noise’ such as to produce circuit overload and debase the information:
middle–class families used to spend their summers in the good old days. Given that the area was now under their control, the partisans had come out from their caves and huts and set up camp in a few Fascist leaders’ villas, infesting their mattresses with fleas and installing machine–guns on their dressers. There were some bottles in the villas, some stored food, gramophones. Blondie was a tough boy, ruthless with the enemy, despotic with his friends, but he tried to keep his men happy when he
