Connell Waldron and Marianne Sheridan are classmates in the small Irish town of Carricklea, where his mother works for her family as a cleaner. In outline it's a simple story, but Rooney tells it with bravura intelligence, wit, and delicacy. Her second has already won the Costa Novel Award, among other honors, since it was published in Ireland and Britain last year. Irish writer Rooney has made a trans-Atlantic splash since publishing her first novel, Conversations With Friends, in 2017. Here's the moon seen in the afternoon sky: ".like a transparent wafer, or a half-dissolved pastille.and you cannot be sure whether it is from its taut, uninterrupted surface that this round and whitish shape is being detached, its consistancy only a bit more solid than the clouds', or whether it is a corrosion of the basic tissue, a rift in the dome, a crevice that opens onto the void behind." Luminous, knowing, lovely literature.Ī young Irish couple gets together, splits up, gets together, splits up-sorry, can't tell you how it ends! Even if these satiric overtones aren't picked up, though, Palomar's humanity is always the chief hire-his and Calvino's splendid prose (expertly rendered by the redoubtable William Weaver). Calvino, maybe the subtlest of all living writers, picks up along the way various intellectual fashions (Marxism, deconstructionism) only to put them down again gently askew: a Foucault-ian visit to a butcher shop is a standout. Each short non-adventure is another illustration of the beauty of the subjective, that which we nonetheless try to destroy or transcend. Palomar's old-married-pair quasi-conversations) how turtles mate the way birds must see the world below as all surface the vagaries of the head overruling the eye (Palomar, on a topless beach, tries not to observe the naked breasts-then decides, on philosophical grounds, to observe them-to predictably outraged results). Some of the things he observes: how the "sword" of the sun's reflection on the ocean always stops exactly at a swimmer's eye the possible meaning of birdcalls (humorously contrasted with Mr.
Hulot: at odds or at war or in love with the big in small, the small in big, the whole old figure/ground confusion.
Palomar-who, as his name suggests, would like to be the clearest, adroitest, purest non-participatory observer.yet, since he's a man, not a telescope, can't quite pull it off. Like Palomar I crave the absolute ground of ‘truth’ that this small island offers us but I am continually destined, like most of us, to navigate the surrounding ocean.Īs I stood inside my house last August and considered the ‘collection of collections’ now stacked in a corner before me I reasoned that if this indeed constituted a kind of universe, then if approached correctly somewhere amongst its fragments I might yet catch a glimpse of my mirrored self.The most philosophical of Calvino's works, a set of semi-comic meditations upon infinity undertaken by a nobody/Everyman named Mr. Palomar then reasons that ‘the universe is the mirror in which we can contemplate only what we have learned to know in ourselves.’įinally he opens his eyes, expecting to behold a harmonious universe, but the world has not changed creaky, endangered, twisted as ever. He unsuccessfully attempts to imitate such people, ultimately realising that nothing can be known of the outer world if the inner is overlooked. In the second-last story in the book, entitled The Universe As Mirror, Mr Palomar envies those around him that seem to live their lives simply and harmoniously, those who can ‘befriend the universe, managing to avoid the trajectory of murderous meteorites, and catching only the beneficent rays.’
Palomar telescope points out into space, Mr Palomar focuses his close attention within, closely examining each aspect of the self.
Italo Calvino’s alter ego, Mr Palomar, is the protagonist of a number of short stories Calvino has written and collected in a volume entitled Mr Palomar.
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