The book itself is an account of one day in the three thousand six hundred and fifty three days of the sentence to be served by a carpenter, Ivan Denisovich Shukhov. To the untutored eye, the Dutton translation seems a little more literary, the Praeger perhaps closer to the rather primitive style of the original. The Praeger edition has two translators and one of them is the translator of Doctor Zhivago Dutton's translator, Ralph Parker, has been stigmatized by Praeger as 'an apologist for the Soviet regime'. Royalties from the 'unauthorized' edition will go to the International Rescue Committee Dutton with their contracted edition is adhering to copyright conventions. Without entering into the scrimmage, or dismissing it as a plague on both your houses, we will limit ourselves to a few facts. There has been considerable advance attention on what appears to be as much of a publishing cause celebre here as the original appearance of the book in Russia. While a few weeks ago it seemed as if Praeger would have a two month lead over Dutton in their presentation of this Soviet best seller, both the 'authorized' edition (Dutton's) and the 'unauthorized' (Praeger's) will appear almost simultaneously. In sum: wondrous work from the early career of one of the world's greatest living writers.? Calvino, unlike Dine Buzzati (above), eschews heavy and sentimental ironies unlike Borges, his metafictional resources have no scorn to them, instead a darting kind of tact. (How bullets, for instance, somehow make the whole world feel as if it's made mostly of air.) And, though more relaxed and humorous, the 'Postwar Stories' are abrim with the same humanity: burglars in a bakery, prostitute shortages, sleeping arrangements of refugees in a train station, the accommodating schedule of a streetwalker's husband-all funny, sad, unstressed, something like little De Sica films. In the first group Calvino details the horrors of war with enormous realist dignity-focusing on Italian peasants whose cunning is the sole weapon left to defend themselves with the terror is made strangely more terrible by the peasants' blend of naivete and keen perceptions. But the surprise for English-speaking readers, most of whom know only later Calvino, will be the 'Wartime' and 'Postwar' stories. Likewise, the 'Riviera Stories'-sun-shot, fragile works-align with Calvino's interest in fairy tales each is about an Eden of sorts, with illusions of happiness, farces of shame, and Oblomovian cheerfulness ('Lazy Sons') in the face of objective defect. And the most wonderful of these, as comic as it is metaphysically profound, is 'The Adventure of a Bather': a matron, swimming alone, loses the bottom of her bathing suit and cannot emerge from the sea, realizing that it is her nakedness now that has become the greater sea, overtaking and overcoming her like an error that must be paid for.

There are four categories: 'Riviera Stories,' 'Wartime Stories,' 'Postwar Stories'-and 'Stories of Love and Loneliness,' in which some of Calvino's later, expanded-on conceptual concerns (reading, photography, people uncomfortable within the environments they've created themselves) have begun to emerge.

Dazzling early Calvino, stories from the mid-Forties and the Fifties.

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