This collection of short stories has an interesting history: it was meant to be part of a larger collection of stories, The Five Senses, where each story was connected to a different sense, but Calvino died before completing his work: the final two senses of vision and touch are missing. Only the three included in this book were finished. We get taste, smell, and sound.
These short stories are peak Calvino: sensual, descriptive, inventive, yet universal.
The stories are: Under the Jaguar Sun, A King Listens, and The Name, the Nose.
The titular story is an erotically charged story of a couple on their honeymoon in Oaxaca, whereas A King Listens is the story of a tyrannical paranoid leader, trapped in his large palace: the story is about hearing. The final one is about smell, about the chase for desire, about perfumes…
A great little collection of stories with an inventive premise.
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