Recommendations
Books Like The Baron in the Trees
Best books to read after The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
The Baron in the Trees is Calvino's most charming and accessible moral fable — Cosimo's decision to live in the trees as a meditation on what it means to commit absolutely to a principle and live the consequences. If the novel's playful ingenuity and its portrait of a man who finds freedom through the most extreme consistency moved you, these books share its concern with the comedy of absolute commitment, its interest in the Enlightenment and its attempt to organize life around principles, and its conviction that the most human lives are the most unusual ones.
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The Cloven Viscount
by Italo Calvino
The first-written of the Our Ancestors trilogy — a viscount split in two by a cannon ball, one half good and one half evil; shorter than The Baron and the most purely comic of the three; the comparison between Cosimo's extreme unity of principle and the Viscount's literal split between good and evil shows the range of Calvino's uses of extreme premise
- 2Buy
The Nonexistent Knight
by Italo Calvino
The third Our Ancestors novel — a knight who exists entirely as an empty suit of armor animated by pure will; the most philosophical of the trilogy and the most interesting counterpart to The Baron in its meditation on the relationship between identity, action, and existence
- 3Buy
Invisible Cities
by Italo Calvino
The companion in Calvino's most purely meditative mode — Marco Polo's dialogue with Kublai Khan organized around 55 imaginary cities; for readers who want to go from the narrative accessibility of The Baron in the Trees to Calvino's more transcendent philosophical fiction
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Candide
by Voltaire
The essential Enlightenment predecessor — the satire that Calvino's Our Ancestors trilogy is in dialogue with; where Candide traces a passive young man through a series of catastrophes that challenge his naive optimism, The Baron in the Trees traces a young man through a series of adventures that confirm his principled consistency; both use an impossible premise to satirize the ideas of their time
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Don Quixote
by Miguel de Cervantes
The essential predecessor in the tradition of the comic novel about a man who has committed absolutely to a principle at odds with the world — Don Quixote's knightly idealism in a world that has no use for it; the comparison with Cosimo's arboreal principle shows the range of the tradition
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Gulliver's Travels
by Jonathan Swift
Swift's satirical fable — Gulliver's voyages to impossible countries as a vehicle for satirizing European civilization; the essential parallel to Calvino's use of the fantastic premise as a satirical lens on the real world; where Swift's impossible countries are external to the protagonist, Calvino's impossible premise is internal to Cosimo
- 7Buy
Steppenwolf
by Hermann Hesse
Hesse's novel about Harry Haller's alienation from bourgeois society — the comparison in the tradition of the novel about a man who cannot live by the social rules that organize ordinary life; where Cosimo's retreat to the trees is comic and principled, Haller's retreat into himself is anguished and mystical; both are organized around the question of what it costs to refuse the available identities
- 8Buy
The Little Prince
by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry
Saint-Exupéry's philosophical fable — the Little Prince's observations about the universe organized as a meditation on what adults have forgotten and children still know; the comparison with The Baron in the Trees shows the range of the twentieth-century philosophical fable, from the tragic (Saint-Exupéry) to the comic (Calvino)
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