Some time ago now, before I’d realised how much this story means to me, I was at my cousin’s wedding reception, and the guest book was being handed round the tables and suddenly it was in front of me and I was at a loss as to what to write, and then I found myself just writing ‘Calvino’ and the title of this story.
I love love stories, but I feel they’re just about the hardest type of stories to do a good job of. If they indeed are, I think that one reason for that – and probably there are several – is that, as Jean Valjean and co sing, “to love another person is to see the face of God”, and capturing the face of God is no easy task – let alone two of the damn things. I think more elemental approaches get round that difficulty to some extent, and this story is a model in that respect.
So far as I can gather from cursory research: First published, in Italian, in 1958 in the third section of Calvino’s collection I racconti. That third section, titled ‘Gli amori difficili’, was then expanded into a collection of the same name, published in 1970. William Weaver’s English translation of the latter collection then came out in 1983, with a couple of other added stories – and this was the first of at least two translated collections of Calvino stories, somewhat different in content, with the English title Difficult Loves. I have the Vintage edition of that first translated collection
A Personal Anthology 