Mr. Palomar by Italo Calvino

Published 1983 · 128 pages · 28,860 words · about 2 hours at an average pace · Fiction, Literary Fiction, Philosophy

How hard is Mr. Palomar to read?

Mr. Palomar scores 56 out of 100 for difficulty on ReadingRate, making it quite demanding. The score is a weighted composite of nine measures: four of how hard the prose is to parse, five of how hard the meaning is to extract.

Vocabulary: 50 out of 100
Precise descriptive vocabulary drawn from natural history, gastronomy, astronomy, and philosophy. Calvino's lexical range is wide but never ostentatious.
Sentence structure: 48 out of 100
Sentences spiral outward as Palomar's observations generate qualifications, corrections, and sub-observations. The syntax mirrors the recursive nature of perception.
Abstraction: 70 out of 100
Begins with concrete observation but relentlessly escalates toward epistemological and ontological questions. The movement from particular to universal is the book's central dynamic.
Information density: 65 out of 100
Each short chapter is packed with descriptive precision and philosophical implication. Nothing is wasted; every observation carries conceptual weight.
Narrative indirection: 55 out of 100
There is no plot. Meaning accumulates through the juxtaposition of Palomar's attempts, and the reader must construct the argument from the pattern of failures.
Symbolic density: 55 out of 100
Ordinary objects — waves, cheese, lawns — become symbols of the knowable and unknowable. The entire book is a sustained metaphor for the relationship between mind and world.
Ironic distance: 50 out of 100
Calvino observes Palomar observing the world, and the doubled perspective creates gentle but persistent irony. Palomar's seriousness is both the book's subject and its joke.
Resolution withholding: 55 out of 100
No observation reaches a satisfying conclusion. The final chapter on death withholds the ultimate resolution by ending mid-thought.
Structural complexity: 60 out of 100
Twenty-seven chapters organized in a 3x3x3 grid with mathematical precision. The numbering system encodes a taxonomy of modes of inquiry that the reader must decode.

How Mr. Palomar is regarded

Mr. Palomar holds a literary regard score of 81 out of 100, weighing its place in the canon, its critical reception, its influence on other writers, and the standing of its author. Regard is measured separately from difficulty: a demanding book is not necessarily an admired one.

Where Mr. Palomar sits in Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism

Placed by a full reading of the text (51 passages), not from reputation. Each verdict quotes the passage that earned it. On the axis from myth to irony, Mr. Palomar scores 86 out of 100. A second mythos, comedy, pulls at it with a weight of 0.2. About the map of stories.

Mode: Ironic
Mr. Palomar goes off along the beach, tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything.
Symbol: Literal & Descriptive
Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself is this: stick to what I see.
Mythos: Irony ii (Quixotic Satire) (irony ii)
in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object.
Genre: Anatomy + Confession
The cheese shop appears to Mr. Palomar the way an encyclopedia looks to an autodidact

Where the story of Mr. Palomar takes place

  • Rome terrace, seaside and garden, early 1980s (1980 to 1984), the main setting
  • Paris shops and the Vincennes and Jardin des Plantes zoos, early 1980s (1980 to 1984)
  • Journeys to Kyoto's Ryoanji and the ruins of Tula, Mexico (1980 to 1984)

5 things that are true of Mr. Palomar, with the passage for each

  1. The book opens with Palomar insisting on watching a single wave, not waves in general.

    in his desire to avoid vague sensations, he establishes for his every action a limited and precise object.

  2. Palomar's tactics for the bare-breasted sunbather end with her springing up and leaving as though from a satyr.

    she suddenly springs up, covers herself with an impatient huff, and goes off, shrugging in irritation, as if she were avoiding the tiresome insistence of a satyr.

  3. The Tula schoolteacher answers every statue with the same words.

    At each statue, each figure carved in a relief or on a column, the teacher supplies some facts and then invariably adds, “We don’t know what it means.”

  4. Palomar has a rule of biting his tongue three times before speaking.

    Mr. Palomar has made a habit of biting his tongue three times before asserting anything.

  5. The book ends with Palomar's decision to describe every instant, followed by a three-word death.

    He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies.

Scenes in Mr. Palomar that Frye would name

37 sightings of Frye's terms in the text. The strongest:

Pathos, Learning to be dead
He decides that he will set himself to describing every instant of his life, and until he has described them all he will no longer think of being dead. At that moment he dies. The hero's death closes the whole book.
Agon, Reading a wave
Mr. Palomar does not lose heart and at each moment he thinks he has managed to see everything to be seen from his observation point, but then something always crops up that he had not borne in mind. The contest with a single wave: repeated attempts to master it, each defeated by what was overlooked.
Anagnorisis, The universe as mirror
Mr. Palomar, who does not love himself, has always taken care not to encounter himself face to face; this is why he preferred to take refuge among the galaxies Palomar recognises that his flight into cosmic contemplation was avoidance of self.
Eiron, Reading a wave
Mr. Palomar goes off along the beach, tense and nervous as when he came, and even more unsure about everything. The self-deprecating unraveler leaves in defeat.
Eiron, The naked bosom
The dead weight of an intolerant tradition prevents anyone’s properly understanding the most enlightened intentions, Palomar bitterly concludes. His over-scrupulous reasoning undoes itself comically.
Demonic imagery, The sword of the sun
Mr. Palomar suddenly feels like flotsam amid flotsam, a corpse rolling on the garbage-beaches of the cemetery-continents. A waste-strewn sea of death is the demonic parody of the sunlit sea.

Books that share these scenes with Mr. Palomar

About the author

Italo Calvino