CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM (16)
By:
February 26, 2026
One in a series of enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, analyzing and celebrating our favorite… anti-fascist art! Series edited by Josh Glenn.
THE BARON IN THE TREES
When I was a kid my mother would make this dish called, innocuously, hamburger soup. I hated it with an unreasoning and outsized passion. Though the thought of it would actually trigger a gag reflex, it was composed of seemingly anodyne, if decidedly midcentury, ingredients: hamburger, canned tomatoes, a can of beef consommé, a can of onion soup, red wine, celery. But some sour alchemy made it revolting. Because it seemed so harmless, my mother was sure that this was a temporary, absurd and childish preference and she kept hamburger soup in the rotation. Every so often, it would leap cackling out of the shadows and ruin my dinner.
Anyway, in Italo Calvino’s The Baron in the Trees, Cosimo, a young man from a wealthy family, is periodically served everyone’s favorite meal, snails, which he despises. One day snails are on the dinner menu twice, snail soup followed by snails, and he is banished from the table for refusing them. He then climbs up a tree and says he is never coming down — and he never does. He lives a wide-ranging, rich life in the trees. It’s a huge pain in the ass, sometimes, living up there, but it allows him to escape his rigid aristocratic life forever.
When I first read the book as a teen, it was the willingness to act uncompromisingly and with finality against the autocracy of adults that I identified with — a complete rejection of the authoritarianism of parents, of expectations, of dinner. It was only years later that I came to think of it as more than a utopian fable: It was written in the years after WWII, after the fall of fascism but also after the promise of post-war anti-fascism and communism had withered. It has all of that in it.
In Italy fascism had been fashioned from the weight of pre-Italian history, Roman history, mixed with the new nationalism of a still young country (Italy as we know it was born in 1861). If your name was Italo and your mother was an anti-fascist, this weight was especially crushing, I bet. In 1943, Italo’s mother had him join the Garibaldi brigade to fight the fascists and the occupying Nazis. She was imprisoned for not informing on her son — and, reportedly, refused to give him up even when they threatened to kill her husband. Heavy.
So what is remarkable, and even more remarkable in that it wears all of this so very lightly, is that The Baron in the Trees is an anti-fascist book, but also an anti-anti-fascist book. A book that rejects the rigidity of fascism but also the failure of anti-fascism to imagine a better Italy, a redemptive Italy. A book that rejects the void where fascism and anti-fascism met and were obliterated, and searches after a third path of wonder and dreams, an enlightenment in the trees.
CAHUN YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Josh Glenn | Mark Kingwell on ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON | Lynn Peril on ZAZOUS | Judith Zissman on DIE GEDANKEN SIND FREI | Annie Nocenti on MEDIUM COOL | Mike Watt on FASCIST | William Nericcio on LALO ALCARAZ | Josh Glenn on THE LADY VANISHES | Carlo Rotella on INQUIETUD | Heather Quinlan on CASABLANCA | Adam McGovern on HEART OF GLASS (MAD JENNY) | Matthew Battles on WOODY’S GUITAR | Carl Wilson on PALACES OF GOLD | Ramona Lyons on UPRIGHT WOMEN WANTED | Lucy Sante on CAMOUFLAGE | Adelina Vaca on THE LIVES OF OTHERS | Tom Nealon on THE BARON IN THE TREES | Nikhil Singh on PARIS PEASANT | Mandy Keifetz on THE REVOLUTION WILL NOT BE TELEVISED | Gordon Dahlquist on THE CONFORMIST | Michael Grasso on PYNCHONIA | Gabriela Pedranti on THE ETERNAUT | Heather Kapplow on ANTI-FASCIST PASTA | Marc Weidenbaum on (WHAT’S SO FUNNY ’BOUT) PEACE, LOVE, AND UNDERSTANDING | Peggy Nelson on PUPPETS | Sonia Marques on CARNATIONS AGITPROP.
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