Calvino, Italo

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Calvino, Italo

Personal

Born October 15, 1923, in Santiago de las Vagas, Cuba; died following a cerebral hemorrhage September 19, 1985, in Siena, Italy; son of Mario (a botanist) and Eva (a botanist; maiden name, Mameli) Calvino; married Chichita Singer (a translator), February 19, 1964; children: Giovanna. Education: University of Turin, graduated, 1947.

Career

Writer. Giulio Einaudi Editore (publisher), Turin, Italy, member of editorial staff, 1947-83; lecturer. Wartime service: Member of Italian Resistance, 1943-45.

Awards, Honors

Viareggio prize, 1957; Bagutta prize, 1959, for I racconti; Veillon prize, 1963; Feltrinelli prize, 1972; honorary member of American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, 1975; Österreichiches Stätspreis für Europäische Literatur, 1976; Italian Folktales named among American Library Association's Notable Books of the Year, 1980; Grande Aigle d'Or, Festival du Livre (Nice, France), 1982; honorary degree from Mount Holyoke College, 1984; Riccione prize, for Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno.

Writings

FICTION

Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1947, translation by Archibald Colquhoun published as The Path to the Nest of Spiders, Collins (London, England), 1956, Beacon Press (Boston, MA), 1957, revised edition, Ecco Press (New York, NY), 2000.

Ultimo viene il corvo (short stories; title means "Last Comes the Crow"; also see below), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1949.

Il visconte dimezzato (novel; title means "The Cloven Viscount"; also see below), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1952.

L'entrata en guerra (short stories; title means "Entering the War"), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1954.

Il barone rampante (novel; also see below), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1957, translation by Archibald Colquhoun published as The Baron in the Trees, Random House (New York, NY), 1959, Italian text published under original title with introduction, notes and vocabulary by J. R. Woodhouse, Manchester University Press (Manchester, England), 1970.

Il cavaliere inesistente (novel; title means "The Non-existent Knight"; also see below), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1959.

La giornata d'uno scutatore (novella; title means "The Watcher"; also see below), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1963.

La speculazione edilizia (novella; title means "A Plunge into Real Estate"; also see below), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1963.

Ti con zero (stories), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1967, translation by William Weaver published as T Zero, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1969, published as Time and the Hunter, J. Cape (London, England), 1970.

Le cosmicomiche (stories), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), translation by William Weaver published as Cosmicomics, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1968.

La memoria del mondo (stories; title means "Memory of the World"), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1968.

La citta invisibili (novel), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1972, translation by Weaver published as Invisible Cities, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1974.

Il castello dei destini incrociati (includes text originally published in Tarocchi), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1973, translation by Weaver published as The Castle of Crossed Destinies, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1976.

Marcovaldo ovvero le stagioni in citta, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1973, translation by William Weaver published as Marcovaldo; or, The Seasons in the City, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1983.

Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore (novel), 1979, translation by William Weaver published as If on a winter's night a traveler, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1981.

Palomar (novel), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1983, translation by William Weaver published as Mr. Palomar, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1985.

Cosmicomiche vecchie e nuove (title means "Cosmicomics Old and New"), Garzanti (Milan, Italy), 1984.

Sotto il sole giaguaro (stories), Garzanti (Milan, Italy), 1986, translation by William Weaver published as Under the Jaguar Sun, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1988.

Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1995.

(Editor and author of introduction) Fantastic Tales: Visionary and Everyday, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1997.

Lettere 1940-1985, edited by Luca Baranelli, introduction by Claudio Milanini, Mondadori (Milan, Italy), 2000.

Contributor to books, including Tarocchi, F. M. Ricci (Parma, Italy), 1969, translated as Tarots: The Viscount Pack in Bergamo and New York, 1975.

OMNIBUS VOLUMES

Adam, One Afternoon and Other Stories (contains translation by Colquhoun and Peggy White of stories in Ultimo viene il corvo and of "La formica argentina"; also see below), Collins (London, England), 1957.

I racconti (title means "Stories"; includes "La nuvola de smog" and "La formica argentina"; also see below), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1958.

I nostri antenati (contains Il cavaliere inesistente, Il visconte dimezzato, and Il barone rampante; also see below), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1960, translation by Archibald Colquhoun with new introduction by the author published as Our Ancestors, Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1980.

The Nonexistent Knight and The Cloven Viscount: Two Short Novels (contains translation by Archibald Colquhoun of Il visconte dimezzato and Il cavaliere inesistente), Random House (New York, NY), 1962.

La nuvola de smog e La formica argentina (also see below), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1965.

Gli amore dificile (contains stories originally published in Ultimo viene il corvo and I racconti), Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1970, translation by William Weaver, Archibald Colquhoun, and Peggy Wright published as Difficult Loves, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1984, translation by Weaver and D. C. Carne-Ross published with their translations of "La nuvola de smog" and La speculazione edilizia under same title (also see below), Secker & Warburg (London, England), 1984.

The Watcher and Other Stories (contains translations by William Weaver, Archibald Colquhoun, and Peggy Wright of La giornata d'uno scutatore, "La nuvola de smog," and "La formica argentina"), Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1971.

EDITOR

Cesare Pavese, La letteratura americana e altri saggi, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1951.

(And reteller) Fiabe italiane: Raccolte della tradizione popolare durante gli ultimi cento anni e transcritte in lingua dai vari dialetti, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1956, portions translated by Louis Brigante as Italian Fables, Orion Press (New York, NY), 1959, translation of complete text by George Martin published as Italian Folktales, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1980.

Cesare Pavese, Poesie edite e inedite, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1962.

Cesare Pavese, Lettere (with Lorenzo Mondo and Davide Lajolo) Volume 1: 1924-1944 (sole editor), Volume 2: 1945-1950, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1966.

Vittorini: Progettazione e letteratura, All'Insegno del Pesce d'Oro, 1968.

(And reteller) Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando furioso, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1970.

Jakob Ludwig Karl Grimm and Wilhelm Karl Grimm, Fiabe, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1970.

L'uccel belverde e altre fiabe italiane, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1972, translation by Sylvia Mulcahy of selections published as Italian Folk Tales, Dent (London, England), 1975.

Il principe granchio e altre fiabe italiane, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1974.

Racconti fantastici dell'ottocento, Mondadori (Milan, Italy), 1983, translation published as Fantastical Tales, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1994.

Also editor of fiction series "Cento Pagi" for Einaudi. Co-editor with Elio Vittorini of literary magazine Il Menabo, 1959-66.

OTHER

Una pietra sopra: discorsi di letteratura e societa, Einaudi (Turin, Italy), 1980, translation by Patrick Creagh published as The Uses of Literature: Essays, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1986.

Collezione di sabbia: emblemi bizzarri e inquietanti del nostro passato e del nostro futuro gli og getti raccontano il mondo (articles), Garzanti (Milan, Italy), 1984.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (lectures), originally published as Sulla fiaba, translation by Patrick Creagh, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1988.

The Road to San Giovanni (autobiographical essays originally published as ITA), translation by Tim Parks, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1993.

Album Calvino, edited by Luca Baranelli Ernesto Ferrero, Mondadori (Milan, Italy), 1995.

(Co-contributor with Valerio Adami) Adami: Itinerari dello sguardo (title means Adami: Itineraries of the Look), edited by Julian Zugazagoitia, texts of Adolfo Echeverria, Electa (Milan, Italy), c. 1997.

Ali Baba: progetto di una rivista, 1968-1972 (title means Ali Baba: Project of a Magazine, 1968-1972), edited by Mario Barenghi and Marco Belpoliti, Marcos y Marcos (Milan, Italy), 1998.

(Additional writing) Franco Antonicelli, Finibusterre, edited by Antonio Lucio Giannone Nardo, Besa (Lecce, Italy), c. 1999.

Why Read the Classics?, translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin, Pantheon (New York, NY), 1999.

(Contributor of story) Ilaria Caputi, Il cinema di Folco Quilici, introduction by Tullio Kezich Venezia, Scuola Nazionale di Cinema, 2000.

Aventures (children's picture book), illustrated by Yan Nascimbene, Editions du Seuil (Paris, France), 2001.

The Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin, Pantheon (New York, NY), 2003.

Sidelights

"After forty years of writing fiction, after exploring various roads and making diverse experiments, the time has come for me to look for an overall definition of my work," Italian novelist and short story writer Italo Calvino announced in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium. "I would suggest this: 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." Taking this as his guiding principle, it is no accident that Calvino is best known for the monumental collection of Italian fables he edited as well as for the fable-like short stories, novellas, and novels he wrote. That elemental and ancient structure of fiction became, in Calvino's hand, a sophisticated tool for challenging readers' assumptions about morality, ethics, time, and place. Commenting in the New York Times Book Review, for example, novelist John Gardner called Calvino "one of the world's best fabulists." Although he wrote in what Patchy Wheatley referred to in the Listener as a "dazzling variety of fictional styles," his stories and novels were all fables for adults. Gore Vidal noted in a New York Review of Books essay that because Calvino both edited and wrote fables he was "someone who reached not only primary school children . . . but, at one time or another, everyone who reads." And for Franco Ricci, writing in the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Calvino was not simply about fables. "Calvino has long been recognized," Ricci wrote, "as one of the most prominent writers of the twentieth century. At once experimental and accessible, he is able to fuse sophisticated narrative techniques with pleasurable storytelling."

Calvino's theory of literature, established very early in his career, dictated his use of the fable. For Calvino, to write any narrative was to write a fable. In Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature: From Futurism to Neorealism, Sergio Pacifici quoted a portion of Calvino's 1955 essay "Il midollo del leone" ("The Lion's Marrow") in which the novelist wrote: "The mold of the most ancient fables: the child abandoned in the woods or the knight who must survive encounters with beasts and enchantments remains the irreplaceable scheme of all human stories."

To understand Calvino, therefore, one must first understand the fable. Calvino "portrayed the world around him," Sara Maria Adler noted in Calvino: The Writer as Fablemaker, "in the same way it is portrayed in the traditional fable. In all his works, the nature of his narrative coincides with those ingredients which constitute the underlying structure of the genre." A traditional fable, Adler explained, is told from a child's point of view and usually has a young protagonist. Although not all of Calvino's protagonists or narrators are young, John Gatt-Rutter maintained in the Journal of European Studies, "The childlike psychology is characteristic of all [of them], whatever their supposed age." The presence of such a youthful narrator/protagonist in Calvino's work lent a fanciful touch to his fiction because, according to Pacifici, "only a youngster possesses a real sense of enchantment with nature, a sense of tranquility and discovery of the mysteries of life."

Another aspect of the fable is what Adler called "the basic theme of tension between character and environment." A typical tale might have a child lost in the woods, for example. Such tension is also a constant in Calvino's fiction. Adler noted, "No matter what the nature of the author's fantasy may be, in every case his characters are faced with a hostile, challenging environment [over] which they are expected to triumph." In "The Argentine Ant," for instance, a family moves to a house in the country only to find it inhabited by thousands of ants. In a more comic example from Mr. Palomar, the title character must decide how to walk by a sunbather who has removed her bathing suit top—without appearing either too interested or too indifferent.

A Born Fabulist

Calvino's own life takes on some of these aspects of fable. Born under the sign of Libra, in 1923, he felt that even such a birth date was significant in his choice of career, for the Italian word for "book" is libro. His parents were both traveling botanists, working as agronomists in Cuba, where Calvino was born. Not long after his birth, the family returned to Italy, and Calvino was raised in San Remo, near the French border. This was the Italy of Mussolini, but Calvino managed to escape the usual Fascist indoctrination of the times, as well as religious indoctrination, attending public rather than church schools. With a family tradition of careers in science, Calvino attended the University of Turin's School of Agriculture, where his father was a distinguished professor. His education was, however, interrupted by the war and the German occupation. Calvino's parents were taken into custody by the Nazis and he received induction orders for the army. Instead of reporting, Calvino took to the hills, joining the Garibaldi Brigade resistance fighters operating in the Maritime Alps. Here he fought not only Germans but also Italian fascists.

With war's end in 1945, Calvino returned to college, though this time he studied literature, doing his graduate thesis on the writer Joseph Conrad. He also became a member of the Communist Party, working for leftist newspapers such as L'Unita andIl Politecnico. His earliest fiction writings were heavily influenced by neorealism, at the time the dominant literary movement in Italy. Cesare Pavese and the other authors in this movement, who had been kept from writing about the world around them by government censorship, now turned wholeheartedly to their everyday life for themes and action for their narratives. Together they formed the neorealist literary movement and, according to Nicholas A. DeMara in the Italian Quarterly, drew "material directly from life and . . . reproduce[d] faithfully real situations through traditional methods."

Conceived in this milieu, Calvino's first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, and his short story collections, Adam, One Afternoon and L'entrata in guerra ("Entering the War"), are all realistic. A Times Literary Supplement reviewer noted, for example, that the narratives were "sometimes based on autobiography, and mainly set against the background of recent Italian history and politics." But even while the three works portrayed the realities of war, Calvino's imagination was the dominant element. In the collections of stories, mostly written between 1945 and 1949, Calvino manages to bring together narratives that are stylistically different yet share common themes of war and life under Fascism, "often seen through the eyes of unreliable narrators," according to Ricci.

In The Path to the Nest of Spiders, Calvino once again takes as his subject the recently completed war, but this time it is as seen through the eyes of a young and rather naively innocent narrator. This picaresque tale aimed to present the resistance fighters not as grandiose heroes or as cunning opportunists, but rather as fallible human beings. Pin, the youthful narrator, joins the Partisans when he steals a German's pistol as a practical joke that goes badly wrong. Through Pin and his fellow Partisans, readers can view diverse aspects of the war and the immediate postwar. According to Ricci, this novel provides "an invaluable portrait of postwar Italy."

The Italian novelist Pavese was one of the first to note the appearance of fantasy in Calvino's work. Adler reported that, in a 1947 review of The Path to the Nest of Spiders, Pavese praised the book's originality, noting "the shrewdness of Calvino, squirrel of the pen, has been this, to climb upon the plants, more in play than out of fear, and to observe . . . life like a fable of the forest, noisy, multi-colored, [and] 'different.'" Following the standard form of a fable, The Path to the Nest of Spiders has a young protagonist. According to critics DeMara and Adler, Calvino's choice of Pin as his protagonist allowed the novelist to add fanciful elements to an otherwise realistic story. "In [The Path to the Nest of Spiders]," DeMara stated, "Calvino portray[ed] an essentially realistic world, but through the use of the adolescent figure he [was] frequently able to inject into the work a sense of fantasy." Pin is nearly a child, and he describes his world as many children do, using a combination of real and imaginary elements. A fable-like quality is added to the novel, Adler observed, because "seen through the boy's own eyes . . . [everything] is thus infused with a fanciful and spirited attitude toward life. . . . The countryside may be as lyrical as an animated cartoon, while at other times it may assume the proportions of a nightmare."

Calvino's childlike imagination and sense of playfulness filled his work with fantasy but also served another purpose. According to J. R. Woodhouse in Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and Appreciation of the Trilogy, "Calvino's description of child-like candour is often a very telling way of pointing to an anomaly, a stupidity in society, as well as providing a new and refreshing outlook on often well-worn themes." In this way Calvino added another fable-like dimension to his work—that of moral instruction. Thus, with this very first novel, as Ricci noted, "Calvino set himself at the crossroads of his destiny."

From Neorealism to Fabulist Prose

Calvino's connection to Pavese took a more concrete form than that of literary influence. It also led the young writer to not only publish with but also join the editorial staff of the new Italian publishing house, Einaudi. Calvino would remain with this publisher for the rest of his life. He tried his hand at two abortive novels in the next few years, until he finally began to find his own voice in a trio of short novels. Young people play prominent roles in all three of the novels in Calvino's Our Ancestors trilogy: The Cloven Viscount, The Baron in the Trees, and The Nonexistent Knight. The "tension between character and environment" and the moral intent are also clear in the three works. They demonstrate the reasoning behind JoAnn Cannon's assertion in Modern Fiction Studies that "the fantastic in Calvino is not a form of escapism, but is grounded in a persistent sociopolitical concern."

The narrator of The Baron in the Trees, for instance, is the younger brother of the twelve-year-old baron of the title who ascends into the trees to avoid eating snail soup. In Books Abroad, Pacifici noted that The Baron in the Trees stands for man "who, by choosing and acting an extraordinarily eccentric role, tries to fulfill a certain aspiration of diversity apparently denied to man in our age." And in his introduction to Our Ancestors, Calvino explained the meaning of The Cloven Viscount, a narrative about a soldier split in half by a cannonball during a crusade: "Mutilated, incomplete, an enemy to himself is modern man; Marx called him 'alienated,' Freud 'repressed'; a state of ancient harmony is lost, [and] a new state of completeness aspired to." With The Nonexistent Knight, Calvino chooses to tell the adventures of a suit of armor whose inhabitant has no corporeal form; it is spirit only. All three tales are a blending of historical setting, with the methods of fantasy, fable, and comedy combined to spotlight the foibles of modern life.

From Folktales to Science Fiction

During the 1950s, Calvino lived in Rome; with the Soviet's crushing of the Hungarian Uprising in 1956, he left the Communist Party, skeptical of Stalinism and of politics in general. In 1956 he published Italian Folktales, in which he researched, rewrote and compiled hundreds of such ancient folk stories, a work that cemented his literary position on both sides of the Atlantic. The collection was ultimately ranked in importance with the work of the German Brothers Grimm. In 1959, Calvino visited the United States for half a year, and then in the early 1960s moved to Paris where he met and married a UNESCO translator, Chichita Singer, who was originally from Argentina.

Calvino's ability to fuse reality and fantasy also captured the imagination of critics worldwide. For example, in the New York Times Book Review Alan Cheuse wrote about Calvino's "talent for transforming the mundane into the marvelous," and in the London Review of Books Salman Rushdie referred to Calvino's "effortless ability of seeing the miraculous in the quotidian." According to New York Times reviewer Anatole Broyard, the books in which Calvino perfected this tendency were three later works: Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a winter's night a traveler. With their juxtaposition of fantasy and reality these books led critics such as John Updike and John Gardner to compare Calvino with two other master storytellers noted for using the same technique in their fiction: Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez.

The stories in Cosmicomics—as well as most of the stories in T Zero and La memoria del mondo (Memory of the World)—chronicle the adventures of Qfwfq, a strange, chameleon-like creature who was present at the beginning of the universe, the formation of the stars, and the disappearance of the dinosaurs. In a playful scene typical of Calvino—and reminiscent of the comic episodes of García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude—Qfwfq describes how time began: According to his story, all the universe was contained in a single point until the day one of the inhabitants of the point, Mrs. Ph(i)Nko, decided to make pasta for everyone. Rushdie explained, "The explosion of the universe outwards . . . is precipitated by the first generous impulse, the first-ever 'true outburst of general love,' when . . . Mrs. Ph(i)Nko cries out: 'Oh, if I only had some room, how I'd love to make some noodles for you boys.'" For a contributor to St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, both Cosmicomics and T Zero were true examples of science fiction writing. In the former novel, according to this reviewer, Calvino presents a "perspective on the struggle to survive on planet Earth and in the universe," while T Zero "considers the meaning of time, space, motion, and values."

Even as his fiction became more and more fantastic in the Qfwfq stories, Calvino continued to maintain the moral and social overtones present in his earlier work. In Science-Fiction Studies, Teresa de Lauretis observed that while Calvino's fiction acquired a science-fiction quality during the 1960s and 1970s due to its emphasis on scientific and technological themes, it was still based on specific human concerns. "The works," she commented, "were all highly imaginative, scientifically informed, funny and inspired meditations on one insistent question: What does it mean to be human, to live and die, to reproduce and to create, to desire and to be?" In a New Yorker review Updike made a similar observation about the seriousness underlying Calvino's fantasies. Updike wrote: "Calvino is . . . curious about the human truth as it becomes embedded in its animal, vegetable, historical, and comic contexts; all his investigations spiral in upon the central question of How shall we live?"

International Fame

Invisible Cities was the book which Calvino called his "most finished and perfect" in a Saturday Review interview with Alexander Stille. It was also, according to Lorna Sage in the London Observer, "the book that first brought him large-scale international acclaim." Invisible Cities relates an imaginary conversation between the thirteenth-century explorer Marco Polo and the emperor Kublai Khan in which Polo describes fifty-five different cities within the emperor's kingdom. Critics applauded the book for the beauty of Calvino's descriptions. In the New Republic,for instance, Albert H. Carter III called it "a sensuous delight, a sophisticated literary puzzle," while in the Chicago Tribune Constance Markey judged it "a fragile tapestry of mood pieces." Perhaps the most generous praise came from Times Literary Supplement contributor Paul Bailey, who observed, "This most beautiful of [Calvino's] books throws up ideas, allusions, and breathtaking imaginative insights on almost every page."

Invisible Cities also offers a moral to be pondered. Adler explained: "Polo's task is that of teaching the aging Kublai Khan to give a new meaning to his life by challenging the evil forces in his domain and by insuring the safety of whatever is just....[Polo's] observations . . . are a general explanation of the world—a panoramic view where rich and poor, the living and the dead, young and old, are challenged by the complex battles of existence."

In the Hudson Review, Dean Flower compared Invisible Cities with one of Calvino's later novels, The Castle of Crossed Destinies, calling them both "less novels than meditations on the mysteries of fictive structures." This statement could also be applied to Calvino's most experimental novel, If on a winter's night a traveler. The Castle of Crossed Destinies, like The Nonexistent Knight, is a chivalric tale filled with knights and adventure. If on a winter's night a traveler, however, is not only different from Calvino's previous work, it is also marked by a complexity that makes it his least fable-like book.

In If on a winter's night a traveler, Calvino parodied modern fictional styles in a complicated novel-within-a-novel format. The story begins with a man finding that the novel he has just purchased has a problem: a Polish novel is bound within the pages of the original novel. Going back to the bookshop, this man then meets a young woman and together they discover that their books contain ten different tales, and Calvino's mega-story alternates between each in turn. Ricci noted that "the reader is soon pulled into this tour de force that is, in fact, ten separate novels in one." A "potpourri of literary styles and themes," according to Ricci, the novel leads from one tale to another. "It is first and foremost a detective novel in search of itself," Ricci further explained. But even this novel included at least one element of the fable. In Newsweek Jim Miller noted that in Calvino's introduction to Italian Folktales the novelist wrote, "There must be present . . . the infinite possibilities of mutation, the unifying element in everything: men, beasts, plants, things." While the fable explores mutation in nature, in If on a winter's night a traveler Calvino explored the "infinite possibilities of mutation" within the novel.

In 1980 Calvino and his family returned to Italy, taking up residence near the Italian Riviera. In 1983, he published Mr. Palomar, a comic and abstract allegory whose protagonist takes his name from the Mount Palomar Observatory in Southern California. According to Ricci, Calvino's Palomar is a "visionary quester after knowledge," as well as a "wise and perceptive scanner of humanity's foibles and mores." In old age, Palomar—a classic loner and observer—wants to put some order to his life, and attempts to classify all aspects and every moment he has lived. Such meditations and speculations are encompassed in twenty-seven prose passages. Calvino did much the same for his own life with his 1984 publication of journalistic essays, Collezione di sabbia (Collections of Sand), the last book published during his lifetime. He died in 1985, in Siena, Italy, from a cerebral hemorrhage.

Posthumous Publications

After his death, Calvino's widow oversaw the issue of new volumes of his work in English. The Road to San Giovanni is a compilation of several essays or "memory exercises" that are the closest Calvino had come to at that point to writing an autobiography. These works span his development as a writer from his boyhood in San Remo during the 1930s, through his work in the Italian Resistance during World War II, to his experience as an expatriate in Paris during the 1960s. "The Calvino that emerges here is extremely self-conscious, offering finely observed evocations of the Italian landscape or a Parisian suburb, but also a running metacommentary on the act of writing a biography," wrote Lawrence Venuti in the New York Times Book Review. "A Cinema-Goers Autobiography" details Calvino's adolescent obsession with the movies, particularly American movies with their popular movie stars. Movies, for Calvino, helped him satisfy his craving for fantasy, which would show up later in his work. "Memories of Battle" chronicles a part of Calvino's resistance activities during the war, and also the vagaries of memory as he tries to recall it. The title essay tells of Calvino's rift with his father, who wanted him to continue in the family business of farming. John Updike commented in the New Yorker that "through this small, scattered, posthumous book, we draw closer to the innermost Calvino than we have before."

Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, also published after Calvino's death, gave English-speaking audiences a chance to read some of the author's earlier short stories, as well as a few that had not been translated into English. These tales span his development from a 1943 story on a Communist brigade to a later work about a man who goes to get ice for his whisky and finds his apartment, upon return, turned into an icy world. "The earliest stories present a Calvino still preoccupied with the war and the impact of fascism," wrote Aamer Hussein in New Statesman and Society. "He demonstrates his belief—still prevalent among writers resisting dictatorships—in the fable as the best vehicle for veiled protest." Calvino moved from his early interest in communism to later esoteric works in which he conducts imaginary interviews with historical figures such as Montezuma, Henry Ford, and a Neanderthal. "This collection brings American readers a somewhat different Calvino, more the product of his cultural and political origins in Italy, but as ever a writer of fantasies that possess extraordinary precision and beauty," concluded Lawrence Venuti in the New York Times Book Review.

A further posthumous work, Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, introduces to English readers twelve more short works exploring Calvino's life over three decades. The pieces here deal with topics including how Calvino achieved his peculiar writing style, aspects of the writer's youth, and his commitment to and ultimate disenchantment with Communism, as well as a diary of the six months Calvino spent in the United States from 1959 to 1960. For Pedro Ponce, writing in the Review of Contemporary Fiction, the American diary is "the true centerpiece of this collection." Ponce further noted that Calvino's "wry and often withering observations" of American culture deal with subjects from beatniks to Cold War patriotism. Reviewing the same work in Book, James Schiff noted that though Calvino had been dead nearly two decades, he "remains one of Italy's brightest literary stars." A contributor for Contemporary Review found that these collected writings "give us a unique insight into the Italian novelist and, in addition, to Italian history of the twentieth century." Ali Houissa, writing in Library Journal, similarly felt the collection was an "excellent" introduction to the author, while Booklist's Donna Seaman pronounced it a "delectable addition to a great writer's shelf."

If you enjoy the works of Italo Calvino

If you enjoy the works of Italo Calvino, you might want to check out the following books:

Jorge Luis Borges, Everything and Nothing, 1999.

Georges Perec, W or the Memory of Childhood, 1988.

Raymond Queneau, Witch Grass, 2003.

Calvino's childlike imagination allowed him to leave the tenets of neorealism behind and opened up infinite possibilities for his fiction. He imaginatively used the traditional fable form to write nontraditional fiction. Although he was a fabulist, according to Pacifici in A Guide to Modern Italian Literature, Calvino's works were "not . . . flights from reality but [came] from the bitter reality of our twentieth century. They are the means—perhaps the only means left to a writer tired of a photographic obsession with modern life—to re-create a world where people can still be people—that is, where people can still dream and yet understand."

Biographical and Critical Sources

BOOKS

Adler, Sara Maria, Calvino: The Writer as Fablemaker, Ediciones Jose Porrua Turanzas (Madrid, Spain), 1979.

Calvino, Italo, The Uses of Literature, translated by Patrick Creagh, Harcourt (San Diego, CA), 1986.

Calvino, Italo, Six Memos for the Next Millennium (lectures originally published as Sulla fiaba), translation by Patrick Creagh, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 1988.

Contemporary Literary Criticism, Gale (Detroit, MI), Volume 5, 1976, Volume 8, 1978, Volume 11, 1979, Volume 22, 1982, Volume 33, 1984, Volume 39, 1986, Volume 73, 1993.

Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 196: Italian Novelists since World War II, 1965-1995, Gale (Detroit, MI), 1999, pp. 50-67.

Gatt-Rutter, John, Writers and Politics in Modern Italy, Holmes & Meier (New York, NY), 1978.

Mandel, Siegfried, editor, Contemporary European Novelists, Southern Illinois University Press (Carbondale, IL), 1986.

Pacifici, Sergio, A Guide to Contemporary Italian Literature: From Futurism to Neorealism, World (New York, NY), 1962.

Re, Lucia, Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement, Stanford University Press (Palo Alto, CA), 1990.

St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers, 4th edition, St. James Press (Detroit, MI), 1996.

Tamburri, Anthony Julian, A Semiotic of Re-reading: Italo Calvino's "Snow Job," Chancery Press (New Haven, CT), 1998.

Woodhouse, J. R., Italo Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy, University of Hull (Hull, England), 1968.

PERIODICALS

Atlantic, March, 1977.

Biography, summer, 2003, Michael Meshaw, review of Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, pp. 519-520.

Book, May-June, 2003, James Schiff, review of Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, pp. 83-84.

Booklist, March 15, 2003, Donna Seaman, review of Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, p. 1268.

Chicago Tribune, November 10, 1985.

Commonweal, November 8, 1957; June 19, 1981; June 2, 1989, p. 339.

Contemporary Review, April, 2003, review of Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, p. 256.

Globe and Mail (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), July 7, 1984; January 25, 1986.

Hudson Review, summer, 1984.

Italian Quarterly, winter, 1971; winter-spring, 1989, pp. 5-15, 55-63.

Journal of European Studies, December, 1975.

Library Journal, March 15, 2003, Nancy Pearl, "Magical Realism: Beyond Fiction's Pale," p. 140; April 1, 2003, Ali Houissa, review of Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, p. 96.

Listener, February 20, 1975; March 17, 1983, p. 24.

London Review of Books, September 30, 1981; March 26, 1992, pp. 20-21.

Los Angeles Times Book Review, November 27, 1983; October 6, 1985; October 20, 1985, p. 15.

Modern Fiction Studies, spring, 1978.

Nation, February 19, 1977; May 23, 1981; December 29, 1984-January 5, 1985.

New Criterion, December, 1985.

New Leader, May 16, 1988, p. 5; January 9, 1989, p. 19.

New Republic, October 17, 1988, pp. 38-43.

New Statesman, April 3, 1987, p. 27; December 1, 1995, Aamer Hussein, review of Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, p. 38.

New Statesman and Society, February 21, 1992, p. 40.

Newsweek, February 14, 1977; November 17, 1980; June 8, 1981; November 28, 1983; October 8, 1984; October 21, 1985.

New Yorker, February 24, 1975; April 18, 1977; February 23, 1981; August 3, 1981; September 10, 1984; October 28, 1985, pp. 25-27; November 18, 1985; May 30, 1994, p. 105.

New York Review of Books, November 21, 1968; January 29, 1970; May 30, 1974; May 12, 1977; June 25, 1981; December 6, 1984; November 21, 1985; October 8, 1987, p. 13; September 29, 1988, p. 74; July 14, 1994, Michael Wood, "Agile among the Tombs," p. 14.

New York Times, October 11, 1959; August 6, 1968; January 13, 1971; May 5, 1981; November 9, 1983, p. C20; September 25, 1984; November 26, 1984; September 26, 1985.

New York Times Book Review, November 8, 1959; August 5, 1962; August 12, 1968; August 25, 1968; October 12, 1969; February 7, 1971; November 17, 1974; April 10, 1977; October 12, 1980; June 21, 1981; January 22, 1984, p. 8; October 7, 1984; March 20, 1988, pp. 1, 30; October 23, 1988, p. 7; October 10, 1993, Lawrence Venuti, review of The Road to San Giovanni, p. 11; November 26, 1995, Lawrence Venuti, review of Numbers in the Dark and Other Stories, p. 16.

New York Times Magazine, July 10, 1983.

PMLA, May, 1975.

Review of Contemporary Fiction, spring, 2002, Alan Tinkler, "Italo Calvino," pp. 59-95; summer, 2003, Pedro Ponce, review of Hermit in Paris: Autobiographical Writings, p. 155.

Saturday Review, December 6, 1959; November 15, 1969; May, 1981; March-April, 1985.

Science-Fiction Studies, March, 1986, pp. 97-98.

Spectator, February 22, 1975; May 14, 1977; August 15, 1981; September 24, 1983, pp. 23-24; November 20, 1993, p. 46; February 22, 2003, Albert Manguel, "In Search of Himself and a City," p. 41.

Time, January 31, 1977; October 6, 1980; May 25, 1981; October 1, 1984; September 23, 1985; November 14, 1988, p. 95.

Times (London, England), July 9, 1981; September 1, 1983; October 3, 1985.

Times Literary Supplement, April 24, 1959; February 23, 1962; September 8, 1966; April 18, 1968; February 9, 1973; December 14, 1973; February 21, 1975; January 9, 1981; July 10, 1981; September 2, 1983; July 12, 1985; September 26, 1986; March 11, 1994, p. 29.

Village Voice, December 16, 1981.

Voice Literary Supplement, October, 1986.

Washington Post, January 13, 1984.

Washington Post Book World, April 25, 1971; October 12, 1980; June 7, 1981; November 18, 1984; September 22, 1985; November 16, 1986.