Like Camus in The Plague, Calvino removes the war entirely in order to talk about it more easily. Typical of Calvino that he does in a (fairly long) short story what others would do in a novel.
Or maybe it's just about ants?
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I don't know if this is effective treatment for ants, but it sounds solid advice for dealing with fascism - it will always be there, you have to live your life despite it, but you must also keep your house in order and work to keep it suppressed. #CalvinoBookClub #TheArgentineAnt #ItaloCalvino
While Baudino's suspicious behaviour reminds that such suspicion was sometimes justified.
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This could be seen as reflecting how the fear of collaborators and informers spreads distrust through a community under a dictatorship, especially in those in positions of authority.
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Also a warning that fascism in some form exists everywhere, just waiting for a leader to unite and embolden the fascists to action.
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It's easy to read this as a comment on the recent war and the deaths of so many soldiers, while ultimately it was the fall of the queen ants such as Hitler and Mussolini that was required to bring the conflict to a close.
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When the narrator congratulates Captain Brauni on seemingly wiping out the ants on his property, he responds;
"It's no use killing the worker ants. There are ants' nests everywhere with queen ants that breed millions of others."
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Calvino resisted the interpretation of this story as fantastical, stating that this kind of Argentine Ant infestation was entirely within the realms of the ordinary. However, it seems safe to speculate on the symbolic meaning behind this story.
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The story begins almost like a Stephen King horror story, as the young couple become aware that their new home is infested with ants, to the point that they find their son covered in them in the night.
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