Italo Calvino a Journey Toward Postmodernism. Less strict demarcations, more on what Calvino loves and how other authors do calino – though he does quote himself extensively. His mind is few of those which fascinates and asks me to question the very possibilities of human intelligence. Calvino: Lezioni americane.
Six Memos for the Millennium is a collection of five lectures Italo Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death. Here is his legacy to us: the universal values he pinpoints become the watchwords for our appreciation of Calvino himself. What should be cherished in literature? Calvino devotes one lecture, or memo to the reader, to each of five indispensable qualitie Six Memos for the Millennium is a collection of five lectures Italo Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death. Here is his legacy to us: the universal values he pinpoints become the watchwords for our appreciation of Calvino himself. What should be cherished in literature? Calvino devotes one lecture, or memo to the reader, to each of five indispensable qualities: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
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A sixth lecture, on consistency, was never committed to paper, and we are left only to ponder the possibilities. With this book, he gives us the most eloquent defense of literature written in the twentieth century as a fitting gift for the next millennium. This is a series of lectures and in each of them Calvino takes it upon himself to recommend to the next millennium a particular literary value which he holds dear, and has tried to embody in his work. That way this book becomes not only a manifesto on how to write but also a guide to interpreting Calvino’s writings. 1) Lightness: not frivolity but a lightness of touch that allows the writer and reader to soar above the paralyzing heaviness of the world.
2) Quickness: the mental speed of the narra This is a series of lectures and in each of them Calvino takes it upon himself to recommend to the next millennium a particular literary value which he holds dear, and has tried to embody in his work. That way this book becomes not only a manifesto on how to write but also a guide to interpreting Calvino’s writings. 1) Lightness: not frivolity but a lightness of touch that allows the writer and reader to soar above the paralyzing heaviness of the world. 2) Quickness: the mental speed of the narrative — he takes the rapid trot of a folktale as his model here.
The narrative should pull the reader along and not get mired up in questioning the non-essential parts. 3) Exactitude: the novel should be perfectly proportioned. Calvino says his guiding image when composing a literary work is the crystal — the magnificent complexity of it and the fact that it can be held in one hand and admired despite all that complexity. The only way to capture life might be to crystalize it with rigid rules?
4) Visibility: or the visual nature of the literary work is all important. For Calvino, every story begins as a visual cue, to which more and more images are added until he has to summon words to describe this profusion of images. He worries about what will happen to the originality of the visual imagination in a world supersaturated by external images. 5) Multiplicity: a literary work should try to encompass the whole known world. It should be ambitious beyond measure. Without unachievable ambition among its practitioners, literature cannot survive long. So Calvino exhorts us to soar beyond the most distant horizons we can conceive of and then to look down and see everything and then write everything.
This section is a paean to the encyclopedic novel. And lastly, 6) Incompleteness: a good novel would be incomplete, just like this list. No one could locate the last memo. Let's start with the fact that Italo Calvino is one of my favorite writers of all time. His crystalline surrealism, easy tone (at least in translation), and whimsical subjects (by which I mean situations and characters, inclusive) are, to me, compelling. To say that I went into this book with a favorable view of the author would be a gross understatement.
I absolutely adore Calvino's work. Now, I am also discovering that I don't really like many books about writing. Moorcock's Let's start with the fact that Italo Calvino is one of my favorite writers of all time. His crystalline surrealism, easy tone (at least in translation), and whimsical subjects (by which I mean situations and characters, inclusive) are, to me, compelling. To say that I went into this book with a favorable view of the author would be a gross understatement. I absolutely adore Calvino's work. Now, I am also discovering that I don't really like many books about writing.
Italo Calvino In Italiano
Moorcock's is, so far as I've read, the best book on writing out there. Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium is a close second. A.very.
close second. What you won't find in this book are lessons on grammar, editorial tips, or the best way to market your book to the masses using obnoxious tactics like going on Goodreads and spamming members when you have not bothered to review more than a half dozen books or looked to see if said members share any kind of interest in books of your type whatsoever. Sorry, was I using my outside voice when I said that? What you will find here is a peek behind Calvino's magic curtain. You will see that even his explanations about how he does his work are magical. You won't see the nuts and bolts of how Calvino mechanically goes about constructing his stories (though he is very methodical), but you will see a high-level treatise on Calvino's state of mind as he writes. This is a philosophical text cleverly disguised as a book about writing.
The book is divided into five sections. 'What happened to the sixth?'
The sixth memo is 'Consistency,' lightly penciled into the handwritten table of contents provided by Calvino at the beginning of the book. In fact, it looks as if it had been written in, then erased, an irony that is as Calvino-esque as anything else I can think of. The first memo, 'Lightness,' is the one thing that I struggle with the most as a writer. Here, Calvino is not talking about lightness as it relates to hue, but as it relates to mass. He gives the example from Boccaccio's Decameron, a story in which the Florentine poet Guido Cavalcanti is beset by some men who want to pick a (philosophical) fight with him in a graveyard. Guido, seeing himself surrounded by them, answered quickly: 'Gentlemen, you may say anything you wish to me in your own home.'
Then, resting his hand on one of the great tombs and being very nimble, he leaped over it and, landing on the other side, made off and rid himself of them. Now, call me strange (it's true), but this is something I can sink my writerly teeth into. I can apply this principle of lightness, not because Calvino has given me specific instructions on how to do it, but because he has opened a window for me to stick my head out, look around, take stock of the landscape, and enjoy it. He's put me in the headspace I need to be in to integrate this principle of lightness into my writing.
And so it is with the remaining principles. Of 'Quickness,' Calvino states: I am a Saturn who dreams of being a Mercury, and everything I write reflects these two impulses. And, reading the context of this memo, I know exactly what he means and see that struggle in myself. In fact, this is my favorite quote about writing ever written. But can I take this down to the grammatical level and explain it to someone else?
I know in my bones what Calvino is saying, but explain it in figures and diagrams, I cannot. In the section on 'Exactitude,' Calvino goes to some extent to explain how vagueness can only be properly described, with exactitude. In speaking of the evocative power of words and the importance of using them in the most exact way, he states: The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss.
Again, a bit of intuition and reflection is required to really grasp what he is saying. Not because his statement is poorly written, but because this notion is an abstract concept. This 'writing book,' if one can assign such a banal descriptor to it, requires the reader to think! Memo four, 'Visibility,' dwells on the imagination as the impetus for all creativity, particularly the visual imagination. While he acknowledges that literary work might arise from the hearing of a good turn of phrase or from an academic exercise, the majority of such creations arise from a visual cue in the writer's mind. Thus, the need to use exactitude to describe the visual seed of a story or book, which allows the reader to see into the mind of the writer, if but for a moment, and anchors the story in the reader's mind. 'Multiplicity' is the fifth and most inappropriately titled memo.
I might have used the word 'Nestedness' or even 'Complexity' to give the reader a head start, but, hey, it wasn't my book to write. I do feel that this is the weakest section of the book (and Calvino acknowledges as much), as the decision to try to form an all-inclusive novel (meaning: including ALL), is really a question of writerly preference, rather than a universal principle which one ought to apply to writing a novel. Still, Calvino calls on the example of Borges and the Oulipo to demonstrate what is possible in a novel, eve if the pursuit of such a work might not always be advisable. As a part of this fifth memo, Calvino states his vision of the aim of literature:. The grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes,' into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world. Unfortunately, Calvino did not live to see the new millennium.
He would have been fascinated by the possibilities of hypertext, no doubt, and his memo on multiplicity dwells, in fact, on the need for more open-ended work with several possible endings, a multi-dimensional plot that reaches through various realities (a'la Borges' 'The Garden of Forking Paths'), and gathers them into one text. He even goes so far as to call his experimental If on a winter's night a traveler a 'hypernovel'.
Perhaps, in another reality, Calvino is exploring the infinite possibilities of literature and will one day find his way back to teach us more, like some kind of literary Messiah. In the meantime, he has left Six Memos for the Next Millennium as a travel journal showing the direction he might have gone; inviting us to follow. I would not be so drastic. I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an aby I would not be so drastic.
I think we are always searching for something hidden or merely potential or hypothetical, following its traces whenever they appear on the surface. I think our basic mental processes have come down to us through every period of history, ever since our Paleolithic forefathers, who were hunters and gatherers. The word connects the visible trace with the invisible thing, the absent thing, the thing that is desired or feared, like a frail emergency bridge flung over an abyss. Calvino's posthumous lectures are a grand gallop across a cherished earth of letters. The Six Memos For The Next Millennium are a celebration of Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity (the sixth was never written at the time of Calvino's passing). The ruminations and citations extend from Ovid and Lucretius onward through Dante, Boccaccio, Shakespeare, Cyrano, Valery, Flaubert, Musil and, especially, Borges. This is a wonderful construction, one without grandiosity, but teeming with an organic eloquence.
Were I to choose an auspicious image for the new millennium, I would choose that one: the sudden agile leap of the poet-philosopher who raises himself above the weight of the world, showing that with all his gravity he ahs the secret of lightness, and that what many consider to be the vitality of the times-noisy, aggressive, revving and roaring-belongs to the realm of death, like a cemetery for rusty old cars. INTERVIEWER: What place, if any at all, does delirium have in your working life? ITALO CALVINO: Delirium?.
Let’s assume I answer, I am always rational. Whatever I say or write, everything is subject to reason, clarity, and logic. What would you think of me? You’d think I’m completely blind when it comes to myself, a sort of paranoiac. If on the other hand I were to answer, Oh, yes, I am really delirious; I always write as if I were in a trance, I don’t know how I write such crazy things, INTERVIEWER: What place, if any at all, does delirium have in your working life? ITALO CALVINO: Delirium?.
Let’s assume I answer, I am always rational. Whatever I say or write, everything is subject to reason, clarity, and logic. What would you think of me? You’d think I’m completely blind when it comes to myself, a sort of paranoiac.
If on the other hand I were to answer, Oh, yes, I am really delirious; I always write as if I were in a trance, I don’t know how I write such crazy things, you’d think me a fake, playing a not-too-credible character. Maybe the question we should start from is what of myself do I put into what I write. My answer—I put my reason, my will, my taste, the culture I belong to, but at the same time I cannot control, shall we say, my neurosis or what we could call delirium. Italo Calvino is a literary philosopher. He has always strived to provide an alternative view to see through this world and to decipher its beauty and secrets through the mode of imagination and fantasy. His mind is few of those which fascinates and asks me to question the very possibilities of human intelligence. When I finished reading, 'If on a winter's night a traveller' and 'Invisible Cities', I was intrigued and thrilled, and had a nagging curiosity to understand the working; the underlying formula; the quest which must have lead the author to write them.
'Six Memos for the next millennium' provides me a window to understand the methodology and motivation of Calvino's art and magic. Reading Calvino is an experience in itself. He has the marvelous gift to create at the juxtaposition of science and art, the man who wants to combine both. This particular book under discussion is a loose speech prepared to be delivered in Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, in 1984. 'They became an obsession, and one day he announced to me that he had ideas and material for eight lectures', writes his wife Esther. And further continues to say that the eighth lecture, had it been presented, would have been, 'On the beginning and the endingof novels'.
But this collection has five lectures, sixth one unwritten, and provides the dissection of Calvino's own works and also an idea of the enormous range of his inspirations. Heads up, Calvino places 'Lightness' as the first value to be discussed. As someone whose writings makes the reader to fly, it is no surprise that Calvino places this value on top. He is quick to make it clear that he is proposing to talk of the lightness which one derives from intelligence/ thoughtfulness, and not the lightness of frivolity. 'Lightness for me goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard', and aptly quotes Paul Valery, 'One should be light like a bird, and not like a feather'.
Of all the passages which he writes to espouse his first value, the one that stood close to my heart is his tribute to Milan Khundera's novel 'The unbearable Lightness of Being'. When I finished Kundera's novel, I had the feeling of jubilant joy and freshness as if I stood beside a waterfall with patchy greenery surrounding it.
I never fully understood the reason behind the 'light' feeling I had then, for the novel is an excruciatingly painful one to read. But, Calvino explains beautifully: 'His novel shows how everything we choose and value in life for its lightness soon reveals its true, unbearable weight. Perhaps only the liveliness and mobility of the intelligence escape this sentence - the very qualities with which this novel is written, and which belong to a world quite different from the one we live in' With 'Quickness' as his second lecture, he brings open the secret of a story which is its economy, the form and structure, rhythm and underlying logic. His love for fairytales and folklore, and his varied reading of classics have peppered the whole book, and he quotes them laboriously to show the agility of thought and expression. Like a tangent that strikes an arc and flow on its own, he touches Galileo, Leopardi and mythology, and he turns himself into a thread that connects the parallels. He also predicts the sure raise of mass media (and social media), and had the foresight to suggest that Conciseness will be the virtue of the new millennia. 'I will confine myself to telling you that I dream of immense cosmologies, sagas, and epics all reduced to the dimensions of an epigram' In 'Exactitude' and 'Visibility', Calvino explores the calculated and well-defined symmetry of a work, and the beauty and nature of visual imagination, respectively.
Julian Barnes has said, “Everything you invent is true: you can be sure of that. Poetry is a subject as precise as geometry.” It is the same kind of obsession which Calvino exudes. His search is to create an art as perfect as a mathematical equation or a geometry. To create an orderliness using literature as his medium. Literature - and I mean the literature that matches up these requirements - is the Promised Land in which language becomes what it really ought to be. A work of literature is one of these minimal portions in which the existent crystallizes into a form, acquires a meaning - not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into a mineral immobility, but alive as an organism.
Poetry is the great enemy of chance, in spite of also being a daughter of chance and knowing that in the last resort, chance will win the battle Both 'Exactitude' and 'Visibility' are also the values which could easily be expected in other arts and most importantly in painting, drawing etc., Perhaps, is it because of the fact that Calvino himself was trained in the art of drawing when he was an adolescent and his extraordinary love for movies as a youngster that must have led him to the love of forms and colors? Next to 'Lightness' and 'Quickness', my favorite lecture is on 'Multiplicity'. No wonder Calvino is inspired by technical-engineer background writers like Gadda and Musil, and he is also enamored by their capacity of excruciating detail. He quotes Gadda, Musil and Proust, all of those authors who never had an ending for their works as a denouement or struggled to have a one, something a game which Calvino would like to play in his literary works. Isn't it ironic and looks like a divine comedy that this book which stands as his final legacy must itself remain unfinished, although each of the chapters is surrealistically complete and conclusive on its own? But perhaps the answer that stands closest to my heart is something else: Think what it would be to have a work conceived from outside the self,a work that would let us escape the limited perspective of the individual ego, not only to enter into selves like our own but to give speech to that which has no language, to the bird perching on the edge of the gutter, To the tree in spring and the tree in fall, to stone, to cement, to place. Somewhere else, Calvino wrote almost emphatically, 'the less one understands the more posterity will appreciate my profundity of thought.
In fact, let me say: POSTERITY IS STUPID Think how annoyed they’ll be when they read that!' Perhaps, Calvino might have treated Posterity with less glory and empathy. But, time, the sure hands of which determines the best, will always treasure Calvino as an original writer, with a voice which movingly spoke for all that is wonderful in human beings, for all the ages to come and even beyond eternity. References: 1. Calvino is just so effortlessly wonderful. He and literature have a very intimate relationship and she tells him secrets about herself that no one else gets to hear.
Calvino spills the beans on what are the qualities he feels are most important to the literature of the future: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. I think my favorites were lightness and multiplicity considering that quickness, exactitude, and visibility seem to be very self-evidently positive Calvino is just so effortlessly wonderful.
He and literature have a very intimate relationship and she tells him secrets about herself that no one else gets to hear. Calvino spills the beans on what are the qualities he feels are most important to the literature of the future: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.
I think my favorites were lightness and multiplicity considering that quickness, exactitude, and visibility seem to be very self-evidently positive qualities of literature (who wants to read a slow, vague, abstract novel?) But the idea of lightness as a positive quality was fresh for me: not lightness as insubstantial but rather, 'be light like the bird, not the feather.' And the goal of literature as a connector of the wildly disparate knowledges of the modern world, the multiplicity of knowledge in every book, I think is a courageous, especially if coupled with quickness and lightness. Calvino occasionally meanders a wee bit too far from his topics in the essays but his digressions are terrifically thought-provoking. His vast knowledge of world literature is also inspiring-he basically provides a list of great authors you should read (if they're good enough for Calvino.). Although this has the potential to be a little bit too academic for some, I heartily recommend this as caviar for a hungry mind. Italo Calvino, given the meticulousness and conceptual cohesion of his storytelling, is an unsurprisingly lucid theorist as well.
Among his final works, these five essays were drawn from lectures he he was prevented from delivering by his death in 1985, each covering a different literary trait he most valued. (A 6th was never written down.) Equally ordered and discursive, each offers insight into Calvino's writing (though much of it this is self-evident in the writing, as well), commentary on li Italo Calvino, given the meticulousness and conceptual cohesion of his storytelling, is an unsurprisingly lucid theorist as well. Among his final works, these five essays were drawn from lectures he he was prevented from delivering by his death in 1985, each covering a different literary trait he most valued.
(A 6th was never written down.) Equally ordered and discursive, each offers insight into Calvino's writing (though much of it this is self-evident in the writing, as well), commentary on literary history, and useful notes on areas of consideration that should really be on any writer's mind when beginning a new work. Actually, following that prior comment, I should say these traits are SO self-evident in Calvino's writing that the direct explication of them is almost unneccessary. Not that there isn't much to value here, but only after you've already considered works like Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveler for yourself. The examples outshine their analysis, or any specific analysis for that matter.
Lightness I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies. Sometimes from cities At certain moments I felt that the entire world was turning into stone With myths, one should not be in a hurry It is better to let them settle into the memory It is true that software cannot exercise its powers of lightness except through the weight of hardware The iron machines still exist, but they obey the orders of weightless bits Quickness Death is hidden in clocks Tristram Shandy d Lightness I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies. I've had the uncanny experience of having read this book around when it came out and forgotten most of it, yet rereading it is sort of like being under hypnosis, as it essentially embodies a great deal of what I strive for in my own aesthetic and weltanschauung and how I prepare food and live when you get down to it. In his ode to lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, Calvino dazzles in his apparently effortless incorporation of all of these qualities, even while admitt I've had the uncanny experience of having read this book around when it came out and forgotten most of it, yet rereading it is sort of like being under hypnosis, as it essentially embodies a great deal of what I strive for in my own aesthetic and weltanschauung and how I prepare food and live when you get down to it. In his ode to lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, Calvino dazzles in his apparently effortless incorporation of all of these qualities, even while admitting their opposites into the fold, confessing an affection for weight, digression, and so forth. For contradiction is elemental for Calvino, an inevitable byproduct of an authentic, reflective engagement with the universe.
And so he gives us his motto from 'youth on,' the Latin 'Festina lente,' hurry slowly. Hurrying slowly herein, he whets our appetites for Dante, Leopardi, Ponge, and Carlo Emilia Gadda, as well as for revisiting Calvino's own oeuvre in all of its spindly, acrobatic glory. I can only wonder-had Calvino completed the last lecture, 'Consistency,' and published it, whether it would have made me a slightly different person.
Few books you can say that about. I just had the nasty experience of writing a review of this book which Goodreads lost somewhere between the moons of Uranus and the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri. To summarize briefly, Italo Calvino chooses six (actually five) traits he would like to see carried forward into a millennium which, alas, he did not live to see.It almost doesn't matter what these traits are: It only matters that Calvino took all of literature and examined it through his jeweler's loupe, showing us new relati I just had the nasty experience of writing a review of this book which Goodreads lost somewhere between the moons of Uranus and the neighborhood of Alpha Centauri. To summarize briefly, Italo Calvino chooses six (actually five) traits he would like to see carried forward into a millennium which, alas, he did not live to see.It almost doesn't matter what these traits are: It only matters that Calvino took all of literature and examined it through his jeweler's loupe, showing us new relations, new pathways, that were wrapped in a skein in his prodigious gray matter. Having just finished this book, I want to go through it slowly, looking for new authors, new works to read. Like his hero Borges (who is also my hero), Calvino functions as a magnificent signpost.
I plan on bringing a knapsack, a canteen filled with water, a hiking staff, and a library to follow the many trails marked out by him. Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity are the five memos Calvino completed for the 1985-86 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. He died before completing the sixth memo, Consistency. The five we have are gems, and hopeful ones at that: 'My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it,' he writes in a prefatory note, and proceeds to describe the qualities he values in Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, and Multiplicity are the five memos Calvino completed for the 1985-86 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard. He died before completing the sixth memo, Consistency. The five we have are gems, and hopeful ones at that: 'My confidence in the future of literature consists in the knowledge that there are things that only literature can give us, by means specific to it,' he writes in a prefatory note, and proceeds to describe the qualities he values in literature.
Here are excerpts of each memo, giving a sense of the content as well as of Calvino's beautiful style and voice: Lightness: 'The De Rerum Natura of Lucretius is the first great work of poetry in which knowledge of the world tends to dissolve the solidity of the world, leading to a perception of all that is infinitely minute, light, and mobile.' Quickness: 'I would say that the moment an object appears in a narrative, it is charged with a special force and becomes like the pole of a magnetic field, a knot in the network of invisible relationships. The symbolism of an object may be more or less explicit, but it is always there. We might even say that in a narrative any object is always magic.' Exactitude: 'It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty-that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.' Visibility: 'The artist's imagination is a world of potentialities that no work will succeed in realizing.
What we experience by living is another world, answering to other forms of order and disorder. The layers of words that accumulate on the page, like the layers of colors on the canvas, are yet another world, also infinite but more easily controlled, less refractory to formulation.
The link between the three worlds is the indefinable spoken of by Balzac: or, rather, I would call it the undecidable, the paradox of an infinite whole that contains other infinite wholes.' Multiplicity: 'Overambitious projects may be objectionable in many fields, but not in literature.Only if poets and writers set themselves tasks that no one else dares imagine will literature continue to have a function. Since science has begun to distrust general explanations and solutions that are not sectorial and specialized, the grand challenge for literature is to be capable of weaving together the various branches of knowledge, the various 'codes,' into a manifold and multifaceted vision of the world.' Calvino nails it: 'It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty-that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances. At Calvino nails it: 'It sometimes seems to me that a pestilence has struck the human race in its most distinctive faculty-that is, the use of words. It is a plague afflicting language, revealing itself as a loss of cognition and immediacy, an automatism that tends to level out all expression into the most generic, anonymous, and abstract formulas, to dilute meanings, to blunt the edge of expressiveness, extinguishing the spark that shoots out from the collision of words and new circumstances.
At this point, I don't wish to dwell on the possible sources of this epidemic, whether they are to be sought in politics, ideology, bureaucratic uniformity, the monotony of mass media, or the way the schools dispense the culture of the mediocre. What interests me are the possibilities of health. Literature, and perhaps literature alone, can create the antibodies to fight this plague in language.' I need some time to grasp the whole thing.I'm sure this is one of those books that I'll be looking back at every six month or something.Calvino is an amazing 'reader'.One of the virtues of this book is that you get familiar with some excellent books you've never heard of.The book gets a little bit vague sometimes but I decided to ignore it and enjoy the context.
Is consisted of actually five lectures on:Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and the last lect I need some time to grasp the whole thing.I'm sure this is one of those books that I'll be looking back at every six month or something.Calvino is an amazing 'reader'.One of the virtues of this book is that you get familiar with some excellent books you've never heard of.The book gets a little bit vague sometimes but I decided to ignore it and enjoy the context. Is consisted of actually five lectures on:Lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity and the last lecture totally missing called Consistency. For each chapter I'd like to write a few words. Lightness discusses the necessity of removing the pressure of language and making it light,not as a feather,but as a bird.Like old fairy tales and folklore that says a lot in a few words.There's only one way left and that is to seek lightness as a reaction to the heaviness of life.In this lecture Calvino discusses Greek mythology along the works of Dante, Shakespeare,Boccaccio. Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels.
His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979). His style is not easily classified; much of his writing has an air of the fantastic Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979). His style is not easily classified; much of his writing has an air of the fantastic reminiscent of fairy tales ( Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more 'realistic' and in the scenic mode of observation ( Difficult Loves, for example).
Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply 'modern'. He wrote: ' My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language.'
Primary sources. Calvino, Italo. Adam, One Afternoon (trans. Archibald Colquhoun, Peggy Wright). London: Minerva, 1992. The Castle of Crossed Destinies (trans. London: Secker & Warburg, 1977.
—. Cosmicomics (trans.
William Weaver). London: Picador, 1993. The Crow Comes Last ( Ultimo viene il corvo).
Turin: Einaudi, 1949. Difficult Loves. A Plunge into Real Estate (trans. William Weaver, Donald Selwyn Carne-Ross). London: Picador, 1985.
Hermit in Paris (trans. Martin McLaughlin). London: Jonathan Cape, 2003. If on a winter's night a traveller (trans. William Weaver). London: Vintage, 1998.
Invisible Cities (trans. William Weaver). London: Secker & Warburg, 1974. Italian Fables (trans. Louis Brigante).
New York: Collier, 1961. (50 tales). —. Italian Folk Tales (trans. Sylvia Mulcahy). Dent & Sons, 1975. (24 tales).
—. Italian Folktales (trans. George Martin). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980. (complete 200 tales). —. Marcovaldo or the Seasons in the City (trans.
William Weaver). London: Minerva, 1993. Palomar (trans. William Weaver).
London: Vintage, 1999. Our Ancestors (trans. London: Vintage, 1998. The Path to the Nest of Spiders (trans. Archibald Colquhoun).
Boston: Beacon, 1957. The Path to the Spiders' Nests (trans. Colquhoun, revised by Martin McLaughlin). London: Jonathan Cape, 1993. T zero (trans.
William Weaver). New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969. The Road to San Giovanni (trans. New York: Vintage International, 1993. Six Memos for the Next Millennium (trans. Patrick Creagh).
New York: Vintage International, 1993. The Watcher and Other Stories (trans. William Weaver). New York: Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1971. Secondary sources. Barenghi, Mario, and Bruno Falcetto.
Romanzi e racconti di Italo Calvino. Milano: Mondadori, 1991. Bernardini Napoletano, Francesca. I segni nuovi di Italo Calvino. Rome: Bulzoni, 1977. Bonura, Giuseppe. Invito alla lettura di Calvino.
Mursia, 1972. Calvino, Italo.
Uno scrittore pomeridiano: Intervista sull'arte della narrativa a cura di e con un ricordo di. Rome: minimum fax, 2003. Corti, Maria.
'Intervista: Italo Calvino' in Autografo 2 (October 1985): 47–53. Di Carlo, Franco. Come leggere I nostri antenati.
Mursia, 1958. McLaughlin, Martin. Italo Calvino. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998. Weiss, Beno. Understanding Italo Calvino. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1993.
Online sources. Online Resources and Links. A Site for Italo Calvino. Calvino on Che Guevara Further reading General. Benussi, Cristina (1989).
Introduzione a Calvino. Rome: Laterza. Bartoloni, Paolo (2003). Interstitial Writing: Calvino, Caproni, Sereni and Svevo. Leicester: Troubador.
Bloom, Harold (ed.)(2002). Bloom's Major Short Story Writers: Italo Calvino. Broomall, Pennsylvania: Chelsea House.
Bolongaro, Eugenio (2003). Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Cannon, JoAnn (1981). Italo Calvino: Writer and Critic. Ravenna: Longo Press. Carter III, Albert Howard (1987).
Italo Calvino: Metamorphoses of Fantasy. Ann Arbor, Michigan: UMI Research Press. Chubb, Stephen (1997).
I, Writer, I, Reader: the Concept of the Self in the Fiction of Italo Calvino. Leicester: Troubador. Gabriele, Tomassina (1994). Italo Calvino: Eros and Language.
Teaneck, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Jeannet, Angela M. (2000) Under the Radiant Sun and the Crescent Moon.
Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Markey, Constance (1999).
Italo Calvino. A Journey Toward Postmodernism.
Gainesville: Florida University Press. 'Italo Calvino: The Contemporary Fabulist' in Italian Quarterly, 23 (spring 1982): 77–85.
Pilz, Kerstin (2005). Mapping Complexity: Literature and Science in the Works of Italo Calvino. Leicester: Troubador. Ricci, Franco (1990). Difficult Games: A Reading of 'I racconti' by Italo Calvino. Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press.
Painting with Words, Writing with Pictures. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
External links Wikiquote has quotations related to: Wikimedia Commons has media related to. On-Line Resources and Links. A Site for Italo Calvino., (Fall 1992).
Paris Review. at (in German). at Excerpts, essays, artwork.
read by in 2013. First chapter excerpts. at the (archived 6 September 2005) Chapter 8 of. Essays on Calvino.