[Calvino's] literary thumbprint is clearly distinguishable right from the start in his first book, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (1947), and has remained essentially unchanged since then. Perhaps what strikes us first is the adolescent viewpoint of the narrative. The boy protagonist, Pin, knows everything—that men fornicate and kill—but understands nothing…. All Calvino's protagonists are mystified by the world in which they live. This incomprehension of the world appears so regularly in Calvino's narrative works that it comes over as autobiographical—a baffled rationalism which is Calvino's central limitation. He is non-plussed and therefore non-committal…. (p. 47)

The author's thumbprint in Il sentiero shows other features which will recur throughout his work. Two are complementary: a sensory curiosity and a Euclidean geometry. Calvino's curious pen pokes at the amorphous miscellany of the sensory world, natural, human and man-made, dwelling especially on the stickily tactile and visually grotesque...