The Baron in the Trees

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Cosimo, a young eighteenth-century Italian nobleman, rebels by climbing into the trees to remain there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an arboreal existence and even has love affairs.

My Review: This being a famous and well-studied book, I suppose the publisher didn't feel the need to do a sell-job on it. That little squib is barely a log-line!

I read this book first in ~1974, because it had a cool-looking jacket. It also had an Italian author, which was also cool. But the reading of it was a revelation because the titular Baron was the perfect rebel, firm of purpose and adamant of spirit. And all over what seems, at first anyway, such a ridiculous cause: Refusing to eat snails. I'd show more never had snails offered to me at that point, and I was in full agreement with the Baron. But as the pages flipped on, I could see what was really at stake was the right to set one's own boundaries, to establish a core identity by and for one's own self.

All adolescents resonate to that theme, I think, and that's why I'm surprised that this book isn't required reading until college. It would serve well in junior or senior year of high school. Anything that deals with the process and price of becoming and being an individual seems to me to be a good fit for that age. Plus it's beautifully translated, so it's easy to read.

And for the record, I ate snails the first time they were offered to me. They were delicious. show less

The ecological aspect of this novel is not the most discussed one, but with [b:The Overstory|40180098|The Overstory|Richard Powers|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1562786502l/40180098._SY75_.jpg|57662223] by Richard Powers still occupying sizable real estate in my head it's the first one that comes up for me. Calvino writes early on here of how the coastal area in Liguria, north-west Italy, used to be covered in trees and woods, which made possible the Baron's mobile life up there in the trees. Since then however they have been lost to development. Cosimo, the Baron of the title, came to an exaggeratedly intimate relationship with trees and nature, Calvino writing as a fabulist, but one that we'd be show more better off today if we were closer to than we are.

That's just one aspect of Cosimo's rebellion against his society, a rebellion against oppressive strictures but never against human community. Even living up in the trees, he frequently tried to help organize his fellow men down below into more cooperative and egalitarian relationships, from putting out fires to feeding the hungry to overthrowing oppressive government. It's a hopeful rebellion, one that sometimes bears fruit and that sometimes ends in disappointment, as they do. show less

Set in 18th century Italy, following conflicts with his aristocratic parents and after being ordered to eat a bizarre deliberately disgusting snail dish prepared by his sociopathic sister, the 12 year old Baron Cosimo rebels and escapes up a tree. The initial reaction is that this quite standard act of defiance won't last long, and he'll be down by nightfall. But Cosimo is a stubborn child, and the standard act soon becomes anything but.

That afternoon he travels from tree to tree to meet Viola, in neighbouring grounds, and is enraptured by her, in his juvenile way. Her spiteful nature dares him to come down and lose this dare-game to her. So he stays up, to win the game, and possibly also secretly prove himself to her (she returns show more decades later for the most tempestuous emotive section of the novel). These are the initial impetuses that keep Cosimo in the trees in the coming days. But then the habit takes on a life of its own, becomes a kind of life trial, and he stays in the trees for weeks, months, and then for the entire rest of his long life, as this one act utterly defines him - and makes him famous Europe-wide.

Being in the trees gives Cosimo a unique perspective, both literal and metaphorical, on the ground and people below. This distance, rather than separating him from those around him, instead gives him an objective perspective. Despite being a Baron with vast lands, he adopts principles of equality and socialism. He befriends and helps the peasants and thieves around him. He becomes a dedicated steward of the forests and birds around him. He reads voraciously, mainly from enlightenment scholars, and mimics many enlightenment ideas, and this transforms him into a polymath.

Around Cosimo the main characters are at least as vivid and eccentric. For instance, his mother is obsessed with military matters and seems only able to understand and interact with the world through such a lens. And his snail-feeding sister comes back as an adult to live on the family estate with her husband, and demonstrates with apparent glee the mechanism of the guillotine (following the French Revolution), chopping off the heads of various live animals.

This larger-than-life, subtly magic realist plot is hard to capture in a single interpretation, partly because there are various distinct stages to Cosimo's life in the trees, as he goes from child rebel through to wise leader, jealous lover, and eventually to mad old man. But the slippery nature of the hidden meaning generates a richness of views, as if the ideas themselves are the branches of a tree, hard to support your weight, so numerous as to obscure your vision.

Compounding this fog is the clearly meta-fictional theme. At one point Prince Andrei from War and Peace turns up, for instance. But far more than this is the constant theme of the unreliable witness. The narrator, Cosimo's apparently conventional brother, regularly relates events from the perspective of either people classed as insane, or otherwise seriously misleading. Sometimes the same event is retold multiple times, in multiple different ways. The times, too, are saturated with superstition. Many of these obviously apocryphal viewpoints concern Cosimo himself, but so many other examples demonstrate that the viewpoint of most people in these times is replete with fantastical delusions that they all seem to relish in. Then, at the end, the narrator makes explicit that this is just effectively a story, pieced together imperfectly, haphazardly, dreamlike.

As an adult fable, with these exuberant characters and dramatic scenes, The Baron in The Trees is exciting, gripping reading. But the hidden, almost fractal-like structure in this novel make it clear that there are far deeper concepts at play, and because of this the book, and its over-arching metaphor of living in trees, live on in the memory many days after the last words are read. show less

This one gave me the most fantastic imagery. As I child I always loved the forest and climbing trees, and in the course of reading I was reminded of the specific cedar tree that i loved to escape to, read books on, and even a couple of times, take a nap in. The imagination here is pure Calvino. That said, there are a number of chapters in the latter half that have no business being there. It feels as if the book began as a short story, and then when it got too long Calvino decided to lengthen it enough to publish it as a novel. Additionally, the narrative itself felt quite disjointed at times. It reminded me of Candide, which I disliked. And since Voltaire was referenced multiple times in this work, I feel like it was very much written show more in consciousness of Candide. In some ways, Baron in the Trees is an anti-Candide - starring a protagonist that goes nowhere and in no way changes his belief. Unfortunately, I think this is to the book's detriment. Still, Calvino sticks the landing, and there is a certain magic here that I can't discount.

7/10 show less

Some time ago Audible offered for free a number of books originally written in languages other than English. (If I recall correctly, it was a promotion in support of International Reading Day.) Of those I selected from the list, [b:The Baron in the Trees|9804|The Baron in the Trees|Italo Calvino|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344432724l/9804._SY75_.jpg|865256] has easily been the most enjoyable.

To begin, this edition is a success on all counts - the writing is brilliant, the translation fluid, and the narration perfectly attuned to the text. It can easily be read and enjoyed simply as an amusing fable of a young noble of the mid-18th century, from a province along the Italian Riviera, who in show more typical teen-age fashion declares that he is renouncing his family. What is not so typical is that he follows through on this impetuous stand by taking up residence in the local trees - and not putting foot on the ground for the rest of his life.

Behind this adventurous tale (no other word will appropriately describe the nature of the story, which relates a series of episodes in sparkling prose), [b:The Baron in the Trees|9804|The Baron in the Trees|Italo Calvino|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1344432724l/9804._SY75_.jpg|865256] exists as an allegory for the social, economic and political changes of the time. Our hero, Cosimo, looks down from his arboreal residence, carefully nurtured to create pathways among the trees to facilitate his movements, on a continuously changing world. He sees the ideals of Voltaire and Rousseau and other key Enlightenment figures give way to the French Revolution, followed by the rise and fall of Napoleon.

He encounters many colorful individuals along the way, perhaps most notably Viola, a childhood neighbor who reappears later in his life as the embodiment of free love, stimulating both passions and intellectual argument. Viola's strategy for gaining independence she craved is notable: she married an elderly man, confident that before long he will die and she will have his extensive wealth at her command, with no one to rein her in.

Although the Italian portions of the book are all translated into English, at times brief passages appear in other languages, most notably French, but also a little Spanish and Russian. My limited linguistic skills failed me during the longer discourses, although I could discern the meaning through context.

But that is a small quibble. No way around it, this is a gem of a book. show less

Really satisfying. I love the exuberance of young Cosimo and the sharp wit of old. The trees are his domain and, by extension, the readers when you join him. It reads a lot to me like Baron Munchausen but taken much more seriously. There is humor here but the characters never notice. To them nothing is idiosyncratic as much as it is just a part of life to accept and move on with and Calvino's great strength is weaving such fun characters and story lines through this peaceful and wide-ranging tapestry.

Something daring lurks at the core of this otherwise linear novel. It is a parable of the Enlightenment. It depicts a fanciful revolt against tradition, one leading to an arboreal existence. This life in the trees blossoms through taxonomy into osmething wonderful.

This wasn't what I expected. I sensed with my typical flawed aplomb that The Baron In The Trees would be a series of language-games with half-covered politcs being the nexus of all the fun. There would be no end and the puns would extend outward. I was quite wrong and am damn glad for the experince.