Difficult Loves is a translation of Gli amori difficili. It is divided into four sections of short stories that are
loosely connected by their
setting. The first three sections mostly come from the late 1940’s volume Ultimo viene il corvo. The last
section is mostly derived from the late 1950’s I racconti. Around half of the stories were originally translated for Adam, One Afternoon and Other Stories. None of the stories are found in Numbers In the Dark.
The stories from the beginning section, "Riviera Stories," range in plot from children interacting in innocent relationships, gangs of young children playing war to take control of a half sunken ship, a young child trying to cheer up a woman with his underwater fishing abilities, to a man banished from the village for a crime he might have committed.
The stories from the following section, "Wartime Stories," all take the time of war as their setting and offer plots involving people from each angle in the war. It can be easily assumed that the setting for each story is during World War II since Italo Calvino fought as a partisan during World War II.
The plots from "Postwar Stories" involve adults engaged in crime or existing in the fray of society. They each have a rather light tone sometimes with humorous overtones.
"Stories of Love and Loneliness," the final section, contains stories that each take the "adventure" of a single character as their plot. They range from a study in the complete self-alienation of a woman who lost the bottom to her bathing suit while swimming, whether or not a soldier on a train should move beyond nonverbal flirting with the female traveling beside him, to a philosopher trying to decide what should and should not be photographed. The latter can be read as Calvino distancing himself from the Modernist tendency to attempt to capture short moments or just a single day in a comprehensive story.
The collection exhibits Italo Calvino’s mastery at balancing verismo, the depiction of reality and truthfulness at any cost, with overtones of fantasy. Some of the stories, especially in "Wartime Stories," mostly lend themselves to the older verismo movement. Many of the stories in the collection are more suited to the magic realism vein, while others seem to anticipate Calvino joining the Oulipo literary group founded in 1960 by Raymond Queneau among others. All of the stories are realistic with varying levels of a dream-like quality, and they each normally take on an ironical nature with some thematic element that, when introduced, give the story comic innuendo, expose an underlying reality, or prevent the reader from taking the story too seriously.