Difficult Loves
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Difficult Loves
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Narrated by:
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Edoardo Ballerini
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By:
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Italo Calvino
About this listen
Intricate interior lives are brilliantly explored in these short stories, now presented in one definitive collection as Calvino intended them
In Difficult Loves, Italy's master storyteller weaves tales in which cherished deceptions and illusions of love-including self-love-are swept away in magical instants of recognition.
A soldier is reduced to quivering fear by the presence of a full-figured woman in his train compartment; a young clerk leaves a lady's bed at dawn; a young woman is isolated from bathers on a beach by the loss of her bikini bottom.
Each of them discovers hidden truths beneath the surface of everyday life.
©1970 Giulio Einaudi Editore, S.p.A., Torino; Translation: 1984, 1983 Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (P)2017 Recorded BooksListeners also enjoyed...
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- By Drew on 06-02-19
By: Italo Calvino
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Hermit in Paris
- Autobiographical Writings
- By: Martin McLaughlin translator, Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 8 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 4
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 3
This posthumously published collection offers a unique, puzzle-like portrait of one of the postwar era's most inventive and mercurial writers. In letters and journals, occasional pieces and interviews, Italo Calvino recalls growing up in seaside Italy and fighting in the antifascist resistance during World War II, traces the course of his literary career, and reflects on his many travels, including a journey through the United States in 1959 and 1960.
By: Martin McLaughlin translator, and others
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Under the Jaguar Sun
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 2 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 4
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 3
These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses of taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico's fiery chiles and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, "Under the Jaguar Sun". In "A King Listens", a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant's thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. "The Name, the Nose" drives to a startling conclusion as men across time and space pursue the women whose aromas have enchanted them.
By: Italo Calvino
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The Path to the Spider's Nests
- By: Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin - translator
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 5 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 10
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 9
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Story4 out of 5 stars 9
Italo Calvino was only 23 when he first published this bold and imaginative novel. It tells the story of Pin, a cobbler's apprentice in a town on the Ligurian coast during World War II. He lives with his sister, a prostitute, and spends as much time as he can at a seedy bar where he amuses the adult patrons. After a mishap with a Nazi soldier, Pin becomes involved with a band of partisans. Calvino's portrayal of these characters, seen through the eyes of a child, is not only a revealing commentary on the Italian resistance but an insightful coming-of-age story.
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5 out of 5 stars
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How unique to use a child’s viewpoint of war.
- By BBWrighter on 07-17-24
By: Italo Calvino, and others
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Numbers in the Dark
- And Other Stories
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 10 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 7
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 5
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 5
Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities of the human condition. Here are speculative stories on life in the digital age, genre-bending wonders, and “impossible interviews” with the likes of Montezuma and a Neanderthal.
By: Italo Calvino
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If on a Winter's Night a Traveler
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall3.5 out of 5 stars 666
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 590
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Story3.5 out of 5 stars 585
Italo Calvino imagines a novel capable of endless mutations in this intricately crafted story about writing and readers. If on a Winter's Night a Traveler turns out to be not one novel but 10, each with a different plot, style, ambience, and author, and each interrupted at a moment of suspense. Together they form a labyrinth of literatures, known and unknown, alive and extinct, through which two readers, a male and a female, pursue both the story lines that intrigue them and one another.
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5 out of 5 stars
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The position of the feet during reading...
- By literate rose on 02-09-18
By: Italo Calvino
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Last Comes the Raven
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 8 hrs and 45 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 4
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 3
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Story4 out of 5 stars 3
Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection - one of Calvino’s earliest - take place in a World War II era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities that would come to define this master storyteller’s later style. A trio of gluttonous burglars invade a pastry shop; two children trespass upon a forbidden garden; a wealthy family invites a rustic goatherd to lunch, only to mock him.
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2 out of 5 stars
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Early Calvino stories
- By Brett Dewing on 04-06-25
By: Italo Calvino
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Into the War
- By: Martin McLaughlin, Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 2 hrs and 23 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall0 out of 5 stars 0
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Performance0 out of 5 stars 0
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Story0 out of 5 stars 0
These three stories, set during the summer of 1940, draw on Italo Calvino's memories of his own adolescence during the Second World War, too young to be forced to fight in Mussolini's army but old enough to be conscripted into the Italian youth brigades. The callow narrator of these tales observes the mounting unease of a city girding itself for war, the looting of an occupied French town, and nighttime revels during a blackout. Appearing here in its first English translation, Into the War is one of Calvino's only works of autobiographical fiction.
By: Martin McLaughlin, and others
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The Road to San Giovanni
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 3 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 8
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 5
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Story4.5 out of 5 stars 5
In five elegant autobiographical meditations Calvino delves into his past, remembering awkward childhood walks with his father, a lifelong obsession with the cinema, and fighting in the Italian Resistance against the Fascists. He also muses on the social contracts, language, and sensations associated with emptying the kitchen rubbish and the shape he would, if asked, consider the world. These reflections on the nature of memory itself are engaging, witty, and lit through with Calvino's alchemical brilliance.
By: Italo Calvino
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A Time for Everything
- By: Karl Ove Knausgaard
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 20 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4.5 out of 5 stars 62
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 55
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Story4 out of 5 stars 55
Beginning in the Garden of Eden and soaring through to the present, A Time for Everything reimagines pivotal encounters between humans and angels: the glow of the cherubim watching over Eden; the profound love between Cain and Abel despite their differences; Lot's shame in Sodom; Noah's isolation before the flood; Ezekiel tied to his bed, prophesying ferociously; the death of Christ; and the emergence of sensual, mischievous cherubs in the 17th century.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Measuring Our Distance from God
- By Darwin8u on 10-16-16
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Mr. Palomar
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Luis Moreno
- Length: 3 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall5 out of 5 stars 24
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Performance5 out of 5 stars 19
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Story5 out of 5 stars 19
Mr. Palomar, whose name purposely evokes that of the famous telescope, is a seeker after knowledge, a visionary in a world sublime and ridiculous. Whether contemplating a cheese, a woman's breasts, or a gorilla's behavior, he brings us a vision of a world familiar by consensus, fragmented by the burden of individual perception.
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5 out of 5 stars
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This is an AMAZING Book!
- By The on 09-13-19
By: Italo Calvino
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Invisible Cities
- By: Italo Calvino
- Narrated by: Richard Higgins
- Length: 2 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 19
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Performance4 out of 5 stars 16
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Story4 out of 5 stars 16
In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.
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3 out of 5 stars
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Such a wonderful book ruined by terrible narration
- By anonymous on 08-18-23
By: Italo Calvino
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The Charterhouse of Parma
- By: Henri Beyle Stendhal
- Narrated by: Edoardo Ballerini
- Length: 19 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall4 out of 5 stars 194
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Performance4.5 out of 5 stars 175
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Story4 out of 5 stars 171
In the coming-of-age story, we follow a young Italian nobleman, Fabrizio Valserra, Marchesino del Dongo, on many adventures, including his experiences at the Battle of Waterloo, and romantic intrigues.
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4 out of 5 stars
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Amazing novel finally available on audio!
- By Grant on 03-23-14
What listeners say about Difficult Loves
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story1 out of 5 stars
- JBeirens
- 10-10-24
classic
a series of stories of people living parts of a life that each could be their own novel. calvino was wonderful
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Overall5 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story5 out of 5 stars
- whosis
- 04-09-25
Simple tales; just right
Beautifully crafted, simply told tales of real life and the dynamics of relationships as experienced. Felt right to me.
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