The Baron In The Trees
by Italo Calvino
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Book Summary Information
Author: Italo CalvinoEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1977-03-28
ISBN: 0156106809
Number of pages: 224
Publisher: Mariner Books
Book Reviews of The Baron In The Trees
Book Review: A Real Change in Perspective
Summary: 4 Stars
In addition to his other skills, Italo Calvino had a real knack for hiding serious themes under light and quirky tales. That's a good way to attract readership; most of us shy away from heavy, dull stories that teach moral lessons, and while we can all enjoy simple entertainments, we sometimes want something more substantial. No one can enjoy being restricted to either oat bran or cotton candy - you need both. So this kind of mixture is a real gift, and "The Baron in the Trees" presents itself as a good example of the type. You get the feeling somehow that there's more here than just a silly joke, but what might it be?
The title, of course, tells us all we need to know about the surface plot. It's about a young nobleman, just entering adolescence in 1767, who one day balks at a nasty supper. Upon being scolded he races outside, climbs a tree in the garden and refuses to come down. He spends the next 50 years or more up there, moving from tree to tree in the family's garden, then to other gardens and then to the forest, and he never touches the ground again.
The jacket blurb correctly advises that Cosimo, in the course of his life in the trees, manages to help with the crops and winemaking, puts out forest fires, goes hunting with the help of his dog, studies philosophy, befriends solid citizens and underworld figures alike, draws the attention of his age's great men like Voltaire and Napoleon, and conducts various love affairs. This is all well and good, but what's the point?
Let's take an obvious one first. This story takes place during a time when perspectives were changing very fast - although the events seldom get a mention in this novel, Cosimo's tenure in the trees covers the American and French Revolutions, the Catholic Church's decline in power and the various Napoleonic Wars. Cosimo's change in perspective is a little more obvious than that, and leads him at one time to discard all the trappings of civilization, at another to compose an elaborate plan for a new society, and just about everything in between. All of this makes sense, considering that his new life begins with an act of rebellion against parental authority and continues to question other kinds of authority from then on. So if you like, you can consider "The Baron in the Trees" a sort of metaphoric retelling of the Age of Enlightenment.
Well, sort of. Remember how I said that Calvino was good at mixing the serious and the silly? If this novel were only an allegory of something else, we could do quite well without it, thank you very much. Fortunately, it works on other levels too; Calvino chooses his details with care for maximum entertainment value. It's probably not an accident, for instance, that just about all of the plot occurs during Cosimo's youth and young manhood - we see little of his middle years, and his old age only in the last chapter. Like most young men, this one can seem a little ridiculous sometimes, particularly when it comes to young women. It's one of this book's joys that for all his noble bearing and adventurous spirit, Cosimo falls flat on his face at times. Another such joy is the fact that Cosimo never quite loses the ability to show up authority figures, either by out-arguing them or by simply ignoring them.
Calvino frequently used some very effective narrative strategies in his work, and "The Baron in the Trees" is no exception. Our narrator is not Cosimo himself, nor the usual unidentified third-person narrator, but Cosimo's younger brother, who stays on the ground, lives a normal life and watches the whole thing from a distance while remaining involved to one extent or another. It's from him that we learn of Cosimo's impact on the rest of the world, why we should care about him at all, and why a story like his could only have occurred at that precise historical moment. And it's not just because there are few trees in the modern age, either.
To my mind, it's that last point that makes "The Baron in the Trees" a special story. The rest of it is a lot of fun, but it's the closing that provides its poignancy. I won't say much more, but ask yourself this question - if you were telling a story about a man who lives his whole life in the trees, how would you end it? For that matter, if you were the brother of a man like that, what would you hope for? I maintain that you wouldn't want him to climb down after all that time, but he couldn't very well stay up there, either. Wait until you see Cosimo's solution.
"The Baron in the Trees", short as it is, can make you laugh out loud, but its ending is a sort of farewell to past times unlike anything you're likely to find except in Calvino's other work. This story was at one time published with a couple of the author's similar tales, "The Nonexistent Knight" and "The Cloven Viscount", under the title "Our Ancestors", and as that name implies, they all have something to say about the vanished past. So goodbye to Cosimo, and on to our other two ancestors.
Benshlomo says, Changing perspectives is only useful if you do something useful with it.
Summary of The Baron In The Trees
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. Translated by Archibald Colquhoun.
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