Books: New Territories UNDER THE JAGUAR SUN

“In devising a story, therefore, the first thing that comes to my mind is an image,” explained Italo Calvino, Italy’s master fabulist, shortly before his death in 1985. Some of his images — like that of the boy philosophe who scrambled up an oak and never descended again in The Baron in the Trees — became the emblems of masterpieces. But Calvino also crafted stories from even more pared-down beginnings. He built that dazzling picaresque of the mind, If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler, from just the thought of an activity: reading. The protagonist has every book he begins taken from him and replaced by another. During his adventures, ten first chapters parade by as Calvino creates a hilarious inventory of the possible in the modern novel.

Under the Jaguar Sun, a slender collection of three stories, grew from simpler roots still. Calvino’s intention was to write a book about the five senses. Though the sequence is incomplete, each story continues Calvino’s lifelong campaign to add more territory to the empire of the imagination; each discloses marvels in regions that were presumed exhausted.

In the title story, the tale of taste, a couple who are in an erotic “phase of rarefaction” are vacationing in Mexico. They find a new mode of communication through their experience of the fiery local cuisine. Its spiciness, they find, derives from the seasoning used by the early Indians of the region for human sacrifices. After this revelation, the couple’s own dining becomes a kind of sacrament, the food of each becoming the substance of the other.

Calvino explores hearing and smell with comparable insight and deftness. In A King Listens, a monarch whose power depends on his remaining glued to his ! throne becomes a paranoiac, his mind an echo chamber of suspicion, as he is deprived of all stimuli — save for the aural — from beyond his hall. And in The Name, the Nose, three characters try to track down unknown women whose odors have intoxicated them.

What Calvino would have done with sight and touch the reader can only conjecture. That he or she will want to do so is just the sort of twist that Calvino, one of the century’s greatest imaginers, would have loved.