March 16 - "Dry River"

“Dry River”
by Italo Calvino
Numbers in the Dark (1995)

* * (Okay) Realistic

A man returns home to the dry river and follows it to a small pool where he is able to bath himself in a near-religious experience.

I was utterly lost throughout this story. In the beginning I wasn’t even sure I was following a person on this journey up the dry river. Part of the problem could have come from the translation of the story, but since I had no difficulty with any other of the tales translated in this collection, I must assume it was simply the story itself I couldn’t follow. That said, there were some beautifully complex and entertaining sentences trickling across the page. My favorite was a rather lengthy sentence detailing a swarm of tadpoles.

“And because their jumps were simultaneous and because while pressing on along the great river one saw nothing but the swarming of that amphibious multitude, advancing like a boundless army, I was struck by a sense of awe, almost as if this black and white symphony, this cartoon sad as a Chinese drawing, were fearfully conjuring the idea of the infinite.”