Finest Things Club

I have to admit, I was kind of zoning out as i read the third story, so I can't really speak about that one as well as the other two. But I'm gonna have to throw down with Stephanie about the second story. I think that the two climaxes of the story are intensely sexual. First Jabba harmonizes (or does he?) with the mysterious female voice outside his chamber, and develops some form of romantic / sexual obsession. Then later we hear the same harmonies but this time Jabba realizes that it's in fact someone else's (his displaced rival's?) harmony that he hears. I mean we can definitely wonder about his projection of someone else's romantic experience onto himself earlier in the story. But the experience is definitely at least romantic, if not sexual. And the experience is definitely purely auditory. So I think Calvino still endeavors to connect a sensory experience with some form of sexual sentiment, regardless of how stifled or incomplete that sentiment may be. But maybe I'm the only one who found that the story climaxed at those points, making them the central points of the story.

So I think that regardless of whether or not it's "the point" second two stories, it's definitely a common thread that the three share, and at least "a point" of the second two.

Maybe the fact that Calvino fails at creating the same sensual experience in the second two stories means that he has some awkward food fetish that he just can't translate effectively into the nose and the ears. And, maybe so does everyone else who finds the first story the most convincing, including me. Oh, me and my overshares...