Up to this point, throughout the book I have read as a writer, seeking out the meaning in Calvino’s words as if directly spoken to the author in the reader. Metaphor’s abound, and in this vein, I have taken the majority of them to recall elements of writing and fine points of reading. In this next section, Around an empty grave, I am not quite sure I’ve grasped its concept.
A young man’s father, on his deathbed, gives his son instructions on how to find his mother, missing since the son’s infancy. As he journeys towards the place his father indicated, he notices another traveler across the chasm who will not speak with him, and appears to want to shoot him. Once he’s arrived in the town, he is tossed back and forth between the ‘high’ class residents and the subservient natives who resent the white man, but do remember his father. There is some of the father in the son, and he goes after the women, not even knowing if they may be his sisters, for no one will tell him truly who is his mother.
The story is certainly an adventure, and it, like the others, is self-contained–though in all the stories we are left hanging and wanting more. This one has more of a completed form however. There is legend, and there is a moral of history repeating itself.
What then, have I as a writer missed?
The Lost Children: A Charity Anthology