El sendero de los nidos de araña

Por Italo Calvino

La primera novela de Italo Calvino
«Tal vez, en el fondo, el primer libro es el único que cuenta, tal vez habría que escribir ése y nada más.»Italo Calvino
El sendero de los nidos de araña, la primera novela de Italo Calvino (1923-1985), es la historia de Pin, un chiquillo listo y precoz que en la Italia de la guerra y la resistencia corretea por las calles en busca de clientes para su hermana prostituta. Hasta que un día se le complican las cosas de manera irreparable: le roba la pistola a un marinero alemán y, desconfiando de los adultos, la oculta en un lugar misterioso, que él llama los «nidos de araña». Pin no logra escapar de los alemanes, que le interrogan infructuosamente y lo envían a la cárcel. De allí conseguirá escapar junto con un resistente comunista conocido como el Lobo Rojo, y no le quedará más remedio que lanzarse al monte, fascinado por otro extraordinario personaje, Primo, un solitario partisano. Pero el lector, intrigado, no olvidará entretanto que el arma sigue oculta…

• Idioma: Español
• Editorial: Siruela
• Fecha de lanzamiento: 8 nov 2012
• ISBN: 9788415723271

Italo Calvino

ITALO CALVINO (1923–1985) attained worldwide renown as one of the twentieth century’s greatest storytellers. Born in Cuba, he was raised in San Remo, Italy, and later lived in Turin, Paris, Rome, and elsewhere. Among his many works are Invisible Cities, If on a winter’s night a traveler, The Baron in the Trees, and other novels, as well as numerous collections of fiction, folktales, criticism, and essays. His works have been translated into dozens of languages.

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Comentarios para El sendero de los nidos de araña

[amerynth · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

I enjoyed reading Italo Calvino's "The Path to the Nest of Spiders" but I didn't think it was a particularly noteworthy book. As his debut novel, it lacks the utter brilliance of some of Calvino's later works, as you'd probably expect.This novel is a coming of age story for Pin, an orphan growing up in the shadow of World War II. He steals a pistol from the German client of his prostitute sister and somehow ends up as part of the Italian resistance. It's a nice little story and fairly entertaining but it isn't a book I'll probably remember much about a year or two from now.

[p_s_patrick · Calificación: 4 de 5 estrellas]

This is Calvino's first novel, and is quite different in style to the later books of his that I have read. He deals with everything in a much more straightforward manner here, the characters are not endowed with anything other than human motives, and the plot is realistic in a way that will perhaps appeal to those not keen on the artistic license he often uses in his other works. The book gives a somewhat cynical view of humanity, but is told from the point of view of a boy, the main character, who is confused by the actions of grown ups, who disgust and fascinate him at the same time, who knows that he will understand everything better when he grows up. I would have liked the book to be a bit longer, but the way it ended was a lot more satisfying that many other books I have read. Calvino doesn't over use his clever devices here that make his other books so unique, instead this one gives the reader the feeling that it was written with more emotion, which makes the characters seem more real and less the mere devices of a brilliantly devised and intricate plot, or story concerned just with giving romantic and poetical descriptions, or presenting profound insights.

[librarycin · Calificación: 2 de 5 estrellas]

1.5 stars. Pin is a boy who is living with his prostitute sister. He wants to impress grown-ups, and he mostly tries to do this by insulting everyone. He steals a gun and, after a short stay in jail, ends up living with a political group.I didn’t like Pin and I didn’t really care about any of the characters, or what happened to them. I thought Pin was a brat – between his insults and his enjoyment tormenting animals... I was bored by the political stuff going on in the book. I guess I just didn’t get it.

[maxernst11 · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

De oorlog door de ogen van een 12-jarige, Pin, die in het verzet in het noorden van Itali? belandt. In de eerste plaats een Bildungsroman, sterk verwant met Twain.

[bookomaniac-1 · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

De oorlog door de ogen van een 12-jarige, Pin, die in het verzet in het noorden van Italië belandt. In de eerste plaats een Bildungsroman, sterk verwant met Twain.

[gbill_7 · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

If you’re going to read this book, the preface Calvino wrote in 1964 is a must; well-written, honest in its assessment of his first novel’s shortcomings, and giving as much insight into the period of the Italian resistance as the novel itself does. What he cringes about are the places he knew he was too dark; few of the characters have any redeeming qualities, and there seems to be a preoccupation with sex. He did that because he didn’t want the resistance romanticized, but he tipped the scales a bit too far in the opposite direction, and there are times when the book gets bogged down. On the other hand, it does have an honesty about it, with characters not knowing whether to side with the fascists or the resistance, their fate often being arbitrarily decided in the chaos of war, and with observations about adults and humanity as seen through the eyes of a child. The book does have flashes of brilliance, and a place in Italian neorealism, and for that it’s worth reading.

[nossis_1 · Calificación: 3 de 5 estrellas]

This was Calvino’s first novel, by his account written hurriedly in the final months of 1946—though the available translation incorporates revisions the author made years after the book’s initial publication, as well as including Calvino’s apologetic and nostalgic preface, written in 1964, in which he laments the short lived era of postwar Italian literature where it seemed possible to recreate the novel from scratch. Calvino also muses (absurdly in his case, given the inventiveness of his later work) on the idea that an author’s first book is his only truly original one and that all subsequent books are imitations of himself and others. Calvino at one time had kept the book out of print, feeling that it was unrepresentative of his work.It certainly shares more with the Italian neo-realist novels published alongside it than with the playful and abstract style of Invisible Cities or If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller, but it does share some of the grace and nimbleness of Calvino’s best writing, employing the present tense to springheel jack the prose.The novel focuses on the Italian partisan resistance to Fascist and Nazi rule during World War II, with a boy named Pin—whose sister is a prostitute: The Dark Lady of the Alley—drawn into the fight not by idealism or revenge, but simply out of the wish to belong. He likes to joke with the armchair partisans in the tavern, but is told that he will be shunned if he does not steal the pistol of a German soldier sleeping with his sister. The theft propels Pin into the partisan movement when he is arrested and then escapes from jail with a notorious teenaged fighter known as Red Wolf. Pin sees how quickly identities are created and shed in the chaos of guerilla war—some of the partisan fighter were once Fascists and others will later leave the resistance to join the enemy.Pin joins up with a unit reminiscent of the Dirty Dozen, made up of thieves and rascals. The experience is unromantic: the leader spends most of each day scratching at the lice on his skin and the men argue about communism and women. This part of the book is the least effective as the focus moves off of Pin, who loves getting off a good insult more than dialectical debate, and onto the grown-up screw-ups of the unit.The novel visits and revisits the place of spiders’ nests, a nearly mythical area where Pin hides the German’s gun. Pin’s childlike love for this spot and his dismay at its destruction, remind me most of Calvino’s later, more fanciful fictions, which came after the war had been dealt with directly and it was as exciting to stare into small crevices as at distant explosions.