Romanzi e racconti. L'entrata in guerra

In the triptych entrusted to the historic Gettoni series, where The Cloven Viscount was also published, Calvino collected a small cycle of narratives on the years of adolescence: "they could have been the first chapters of a novel that, through minimal episodes of a provincial adolescence, would have followed the formation of a young man in the years of World War II," the author writes in the cover of the reprint in the New Corals series of 1974. With a first-person narrative voice telling of himself in the past tense, maintained on the same register in all three stories, Calvino evokes his initiation into life on the eve of World War II.