The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino (Translated into English by Archibald Colquhoun)

 

    To be honest, When I started reading this book, I didn't know exactly what I was getting myself into. My mom recommended it to me when I was looking through a bunch of old books in my house. It looked interesting, but similar to other books that attempt to create a story set during the Napoleonic times and end up with 600 pages of boring. I would later find out that I was very wrong about that. Anyways, I thought the book might be okay so I read the back cover and decided to try it out.

    The story is basically about a young boy named Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo, who is the son of a baron and lives in a villa in the imaginary town of Ombrosa in Italy. He and his brother are both excellent tree climbers and spend a lot of their time climbing the trees in and around their property. However, Cosimo is fed up and dissatisfied with his life. One afternoon during a meal, while eating a plate of snails (which is what the family ate almost every day), Cosimo refuses to eat and gets in an argument with his father. He reaches his limit and runs out of the house and scrambles up a tree, never to come down again. As Cosimo grows older, he becomes a master of the trees. Gliding from branch to branch and jumping from tree to tree. He spends his time hunting and scavenging for his own food, making his own clothes and furniture, playing with people on the ground, and reading tons of books. He also writes about his life in the trees, creating "an Ideal State in the Trees" which get acknowledged by Diderot. He becomes famous and attracts people from far and wide into Ombrosa just to see him, even Napoleon stops by during his conquering of Italy. This book is packed with stories that create almost every emotion.

    An interesting thing I liked about this book was how the author writes this book as journal entries written by Cosimo's little brother Biaggio. Each chapter containing an important story of Cosimo's Coming of age from the stories Cosimo tells him and Biaggio's own accounts and witnesses. Many chapters are stories of Cosimo's relationships with people who are always killed at the end of the chapter. The final chapter where Biaggio talks about how his brother met his end is very sad but also extremely funny as he is desperate to not touch the ground. To give you the slightest hint, Cosimo's empty grave is inscribed: "Cosimo Piovasco di Rondo - Lived in the trees - Always loved earth - Went into sky."

This book packs so much into a 217 page novel. It is a relatively quick but extremely fun read that I recommend to anyone who might be interested in one of the greatest stories of defiance of all time.

-Pieter