Under the Jaguar Sun is a rare sort of read about the senses and their capacity for captivating the imagination. A collection of short stories from the late author Italo Calvino, each dealing with a different sense and sensual experience. In this case, taste, hearing and smell. A fictional book like no other, Under the Jaguar Sun takes readers on three very distinct sensory journeys, all underpinned by themes love, lust and paranoia. The story about smell is obviously the most relevant, but I’ll walk you through the others as well. Under the Jaguar Sun, the “taste” tale and title story, follows a travelling couple and their strange association with food. Whose visit to the Mexico opens the door to a sinister discovery and a carnal lusting for strange local delicacies. A lusting that throws up all sorts of ideas about sex, taste, love and the relationship they share. Without giving away too much, this story will certainly tickle your tastebuds. Dare I say, frighten them. To quote the tale directly: “our teeth began to move slowly, with equal rhythm, and our eyes started into each other’s with the intensity of serpents’ - serpents concentrated in the ecstasy of swallowing each other in turn”. A King Listens, the “hearing” story, plays similar mischief with the ears. In Calvino’s second tale, a paranoid king is overcome with fears of rebellion manifesting in a palace of sounds that “expands one moment and contracts the next [tightening] like a tangle of chains.” His only respite is the sweet song of a mystery woman that follows him and offers him a way out. A love song “stifled by the roar of death”, that carries in the breeze and visits him on summer nights. As intriguing as the premise is, it’s the story’s use of the second person which really draws you in. By making us - the reader - the subject of the tale, Calvino puts us deep inside the king’s mind and makes us share in his paranoia. The third and final story of the book, The Name, The Nose, is of course the smell story and follows not one but three characters in their quest for capturing female scent: a caveman, a nobleman and as drummer. Three men, all generations apart, yet with the same preoccupation. For the caveman, a woman is a creature to be hunted. A “spoor in the dusty trampled grass”, where “everything is within the nose”, and nothing is permanent. Similarly, for the nobleman, a woman‘s scent is fickle, and hunting it requires knowledge of the perfume she’s wearing. “What I am looking for it’s not the perfume suited to a lady I know. It is the lady I must find! A lady of who. I know nothing - save her perfume” he tells me Madame Odile, owner of a French perfumery he visits. He adds “For each woman a perfume exists which enhances her own skin, a note in the scale which is at once colour and flavour and aroma and tenderness.’ For the drummer, that same scent is brought to us through naked bodies at a house party: “there beneath me I’m surely a girl’s white skin...a slightly mottled skin smell probably dotted with faint or even invisible freckles.” Like the caveman, he must contend with a herd of smells in order to find the woman he’s after. “Have mercy, have mercy on me, I go from one skin to another hunting for that lost skin that isn’t like any other skin.” He pleads. At the time of writing the book in the mid-1980s, Calvino’s aim was to focus on the five senses. But in 1986, having only written three of the sensory stories, he died, leaving the book to be published prematurely. This might explain the book’s short length and the general sense of incompleteness about it. It is by no means a polished piece of writing, but that’s what makes it so interesting. It’s raw. Have you read Under the Jaguar Sun? Are you a Calvino fan? What other sensory books would you recommend? Pop a comment below and keep the discussion going.
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