Master storyteller Italo Calvino set out to write a book about the five senses but died before completing that project. He did, however, complete the three stories that comprise this collection. Set in Mexico, and following the culinary adventures of a couple on holiday, Under the Jaguar Sun is about the sense of taste and how taste comes to define the couples relationship. A King Listens, perhaps the most fully developed of the stories (and certainly the most memorable), explores the consequences of a monarchs uncanny ability to hear all that occurs in his palace. In The Name, the Nose two men obsessively search for the women who bewitch them with indefinable, unknowable, elusive scents. As always with Calvino, these three extraordinary and haunting stories give us much to ponder. Even though his project was never completed, the stories stand on their own merits and are authentically and remarkably Calvinoesque.

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