CALVINO, Italo

Nationality: Italian. Born: Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba, 15 October 1923; grew up in San Remo, Italy. Education: The University of Turin, graduated 1947. Military Service: Conscripted into Young Facists, 1940; left and served in the Italian Resistance, 1943-45. Family: Married Chichita Singer in 1964; one daughter. Career: Member of the editorial staff, Einaudi, publishers, Turin, from 1947; co-editor, Il Menabò, Milan, 1959-66. Awards: Viareggio prize, 1957; Bagutta prize, 1959; Veillon prize, 1963; Feltrinelli prize, 1972; Austrian State Prize for European Literature, 1976; Nice Festival prize, 1982. Member: American Academy, 1975 (honorary member). Died: 20 September 1985.

Publications

Collections

Romanzi e Racconti, edited by Claudio Milanini. 1992—.

Short Stories

Ultimo viene il corvo. 1949; as Adam, One Afternoon, and Other Stories, 1957.

Fiabe italiane: Raccolte della tradizione popolare durante gli ultimi cento anni e transcritte in lingua dai vari dialetti. 1956; as Italian Fables, 1959; as Italian Folk Tales, 1975; complete translation, as Italian Folktales, 1980.

I racconti. 1958.

Marcovaldo; ovvero, Le stagioni in città. 1963; as Marcovaldo; or, The Seasons in the City, 1983.

La nuvola di smog e La formica argentina. 1965.

Le cosmicomiche. 1965; as Cosmicomics, 1968.

Ti con zero. 1967; as T Zero, 1969; as Time and the Hunter, 1970.

Gli amori difficili. 1970; as Difficult Loves, 1984.

The Watcher and Other Stories. 1971.

Le città invisibili. 1972; as Invisible Cities, 1974.

Il castello dei destini incrociati. 1973; as The Castle of Crossed Destinies, 1977.

Se una notte d'inverno un viaggiatore. 1979; as If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, 1981.

Palomar. 1983; as Mr. Palomar, 1985.

Sotto il sole giaguaro. 1986; as Under the Jaguar Tree, 1988.

La Strada di Giovanni. n.d.; as The Road to San Giovanni, 1993.

Novels

Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno. 1947; as The Path to the Nest of Spiders, 1956.

I nostri antenati. 1960; as Our Ancestors, 1980.

Il visconte dimezzato. 1952; as The Cloven Viscount (with The Non-Existent Knight), 1962.

Il barone rampante. 1957; as The Baron in the Trees, 1959.

Il cavaliere inesistente. 1959; as The Non-Existent Knight (with The Cloven Viscount), 1962.

La giornata d'uno scrutatore. 1963.

Play

Un re in ascolto [The King Listens] (opera libretto), music by Luciano Berio. 1984.

Other

Una pietra sopra: Discorsi di letteratura e società. 1980.

Collezione di sabbia: Emblemi bizzarri e inquietanti del nostro passato e del nostro futuro gli oggetti raccontano il mondo. 1984.

The Uses of Literature. 1986.

The Literature Machine. 1987.

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (lectures). 1988.

Perchè leggere i classici (essays). 1992.

Editor, Poesie edite e inedite, by Cesare Pavese. 1962.

Editor, Vittorini: Progettazione e letteratura. 1968.

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Critical Studies:

Calvino: A Reappraisal and an Appreciation of the Trilogy by J. R. Woodhouse, 1968; Calvino, Writer and Critic by JoAnn Cannon, 1981; "Calvino" by Richard Andrews, in Writers and Society in Contemporary Italy edited by Michael Caesar and Peter Hainsworth, 1984; Calvino and the Age of Neorealism: Fables of Estrangement by Lucia Re, 1990; Calvino: a San Remo by Piero Ferrara, 1991; Understanding Italo Calvino by Beno Weiss, 1993.

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Italo Calvino wrote of his experiences during World War II in his first novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno (The Path to the Nest of Spiders), and his war stories of the late 1940s. In the preface to the trilogy I nostroi antenati (Our Ancestors) Calvino describes the gatherings around campfires, where the heroes of the day's exploits recounted their adventures. At this time there was no doubt in his narrative about the existence of a narrator and a hero. He also spoke in that preface about the hero "affirming himself as a human being." And he said that narrative suspense (and he used the English word) was like salt and declared his lack of interest in descriptions of interior scenes and the trappings of the psychological novel.

It is obvious even in his early works that Calvino is a storyteller. In fact it has been pointed out that he only wrote one other novel, La giornata d'uno scrutatore, the story of a "teller" in the parliamentary elections. Even the historical novels of Our Ancestors are tales in the manner of Voltaire's Candide. The narrators of Il visconte dimezzato (The Cloven Viscount) and Il barone rampante (The Baron in the Trees) are both observers, members of the hero's family. But the third tale in order of composition, Il cavaliere inesistente (The Non-Existent Knight), turns out to have a surprisingly active narrator who balances nicely the nonentity of the hero. The existance of observers, performers, and narrators took on more importance in his work.

During the 1950s Calvino worked for his publisher, Einaudi, making a collection of popular tales of the last hundred years from all over the Italian peninsula. This study, he said, taught him something about the economy of the tale. He became interested in the theory of narrative. Later when he lived in Paris he became involved in the Oulipo movement, and also followed closely the discussions of the structuralists and semioticians. The collection Fiabe italiane (Italian Folk Tales) had been partly an exercise in popular culture. As a communist until the Hungary episode, and founder with Vittorini of Il Menabò di Letterature, which aimed at bringing literature into closer contact with modern society, Calvino also wanted to reflect more reality in his stories. The peasant hero had fulfilled this role in the 1930s and 1940s. Calvino chose instead a city worker, gave him a fantastic Germanic-sounding name, Marcovaldo, and made him the hero of a set of stories representing the trials of the modern worker who still hankers after the countryside. Along the pavements Marcovaldo picks mushrooms, which are poisoning half his street, and cuts down forests of advertising hoardings along the motorway in order to keep his family warm. An element of Ariostesque fantasy is still present, just as it was in the early stories and the trilogy. Marcovaldo is less successful in his undertakings than the heroes of the war stories, but both groups of tales appeared in the collected short stories (I racconti) of 1958 as "Difficult Idylls." There was also a series called Gli amori difficili (Difficult Loves), in which the hero or heroine is in some way hampered in personal relationships: a short-sighted man cannot recognize his friends without his new spectacles, but wearing them he is himself unrecognisable; a bather loses her swimming costume out at sea while bathing off a busy beach.

In the mid-1960s Calvino's fiction took a new turn. Both his parents were scientists, which perhaps accounted for his move towards a realistic science fiction in Le cosmicomiche (Cosmicomics) and Ti con zero (Time and the Hunter). In these two collections of short stories we meet for the first time a serial narrator figure named Qfwfq, like a scientific formula. Qfwfq has been present through all time, from the first "Big Bank" (a kind of primordial pasta party) to, for instance, the arrival of colors and the evolution of birds. He is a figure who is as comfortable among the dinosaurs as he is on Staten Island. His language is ordinary speech, not quite up to telling of the marvels he has witnessed, unlike the language of the scientists that prefixes each episode. The gap between the ordinary language and the strangeness creates the fantasy that brings the marvels to life. In "All at One Point" the creation and the Big Bank depend on Mrs. Ph(i)NKo's generous impulse: "Boys, the noodles I would make for you!" In the third part of Time and the Hunter, however, we find Qfwfq eclipsed and a more serious narrator takes over, an anonymous survivor imprisoned in time, in traffic jams, in futile night driving. The collection ends with the borrowed figure of the Count of Monte Cristo, a prisoner in the appropriately named Chateau d'If, trying to find an escape route by pure reason without action, and so spiralling out through the realms of science, history, literature, and philosophical speculation.

Numerical patterning was becoming more and more important for Calvino. In "Cybernetics and Ghosts," an essay of 1967, he said that he considered narrative a "combinatorial process." In Invisible Cities—in which Marco Polo is the narrator—the accounts are placed in nine series interspersed with discussions between storyteller and listener, ten cities at the beginning and the end, with seven collections of five each in between. The numbers "nine" and "ten" are powerful in the Dantesque tradition, and represent a way of accommodating reality to the rational mind. Marco Polo's last advice to Kublai Khan is to recognize who and what in Hell, which is around us, is not Hell, and to let that endure and give it space. The task is one of observation, recognition, and discrimination, resembling that of the Count of Monte Cristo contemplating his escape.

Il castello dei destini incrociati (The Castle of Crossed Destinies) presents another series of stories, some with very well-known heroes, like Orlando, Faust, and Parsifal. The new problem, however, is one of enunciation. The storytellers gathered in the castle are mute, and so are forced to pattern out their tales using significant objects, such as the fifteenth-century Tarot pack (in the case of the accompanying story, "Tavern of Crossed Destinies," the better-known seventeenth-century French pack). The language is that of the writer who observes the layout of the cards as the stories are constructed. Colloquial speech, which was Qfwfq's medium, is thus banished.

Se una notta d'inverno un viaggiatore (If on a Winter's Night a Traveller) leaves us again in the hands of the writer, not to mention the (male) Reader and the (female) Reader. At stake is not only the relationship between storyteller and Readers (and readers) but the very thread of suspense, that original salt, that is snapped ten different times by accidents occurring to texts between the manuscript stage and actual perusal. The relationship between author and Readers (each addressed in the very intimate Tu form) is conducted in twelve alternating chapters ending in the fulfillment of their wedding night: "And you say, 'Just a moment, I've almost finished If on a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino."'

Palomar (Mr. Palomar) is again a series. Twenty-seven pieces make nine groups of three (Dantesque numbers again), which originally appeared during the 1970s and 1980s in newspapers such as Il Corriere della Sera and Le Repubblica. Mr. Palomar is named after the giant telescope, and the name also resembles the Italian word for "diver," palombaro. He is essentially the reasonable observer trying to capture and set down the reality around him, from the strictly limited stretch of waves in the sea off his beach to a rock and sand garden in Kyoto. The task is to examine the limits of the powers of the writer's point of view. The experiment ends with the death of the narrator as he tries to evade time by describing it. It has been argued that Mr. Palomar and Calvino could be the same person, especially since the essays in Collezione di sabbia (Collection of Sand) bear the same stamp.

Sotto il solo giaguaro (Under the Jaguar Sun), published posthumously, was to have contained five stories dealing with the senses. A writer concerned with observation and description must naturally tackle perception. Only taste, hearing, and the sense of smell were finished. In another unfinished work, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, planned as the Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures at Harvard, Calvino left six titles as aids for an understanding of his approach to fiction: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity, and Consistency, the last unwritten. For such an experimental master of the tale, they make a fitting epitaph.

—Judy Rawson