topics:  | fiction

At his death, Calvino had completed three of a projected five stories
concerning the senses, one to each. The three here are about taste, hearing,
and smell. The title story concerns a long-married couple touring Mexico,
eating wildly exciting spicy food but dead in the marriage bed, in a sexual
drought. Yet as a friend begins to suggest to them that the chiles of Mexican
cuisine originally might have been used by the Maya to mask the taste of
human flesh, the couple's lust re-inflames. The middle story is the best--"A
King Listens"--about a king trapped by his title in the palace, literally
unable to leave the throne lest someone else usurp it, and the
phantasmagorical aural sensitivity he experiences as he parses his very
tenuous existence by means of the sounds he hears in the palace around
him. Calvino was a genius of the empty--able to invest air itself with the
most meaty cognitive clues--and this story is a grand example. The last deals
with smell--intercutting between a Parisian rake shopping for perfumes, a
prehistoric man still dependent on information by nose, and the decadence of
a London rock star at a groupie-orgy. It's a schematic, overly done piece
that lacks focus. Not major Calvino in any way. - Kirkus