On publication, various Italian critics complained of "the 'tired' feel of the plot in the second half of the novel" while novelist and critic Elio Vittorini considered the "stylistic disunity between the early and later chapters" was a problem. Despite these perceived flaws, critic Martin McLaughlin argues that the novel "remains something of a tour de force in Calvino's oeuvre. It is an extraordinarily successful attempt to reproduce a utopian, philosophical "conte" for the 1950s, with a whole range of intertextual allusions and a sophisticated parody of the poetics of the early English moralising novel as practised by Richardson and parodied by Fielding".