The Baron in the Trees

1. This is Calvino's story of a boy who decided not to walk this earth, quite literally, but to live on trees instead--as narrated by his younger brother, who realized early on that he would live a rather contrary, normal life.

2. The younger boy is Biagio: the writer, who had a weakness toward stasis, and consequently became the preserver of text. The older boy Cosimo who would grow up as the baron was the singer of tales, and "was swept by that mania of the storyteller, who never knows which stories are more beautiful; the ones that really happened and the evocation of which recalls a whole flow of hours past, of petty emotions, boredom, happiness, insecurity, vanity, and self-disgust, or those which are invented, and in which he cuts out a main pattern, and everything seems easy, then begins to vary it as he realizes more and more that he is describing again things that had happened or been understood in lived reality." Cosimo's seeming abandon caused Biagio much deliberation in his written versions: how valid would be his disbelief when those things did not actually happen to him?

3. Cosimo's friendship with the brigand Gian dei Brughi in Chapter 12 is a story that could stand by itself. They shared the love of reading--as with many other novel heroes before them--and exchanged books, mostly novels. Gian dei Brughi lost interest with banditry altogether, something that worried his younger apprentices, who threatened to set dei Brughi's copy of Richardson's Clarissa on fire if the reluctant bandit would not go back to his old ways. Because he no longer had his heart in thievery, dei Brughi was caught and put on trial. Before his execution, the only thing he wanted was to know how Jonathan Wild's story ended in a novel by Fielding's. In the end: the need for closure, even if it was only imagined; or: the only closure we're guaranteed in this life is a fiction.

~ After Italo Calvino's The Baron in the Trees (1957)