Italo Calvino
2 books analyzed
Biography
Italo Calvino (1923-1985) was born in Cuba, raised in Italy, fought with the partisans against Fascism as a teenager, and became one of the most inventive novelists of the twentieth century. His career arc moved from neorealist fiction (The Path to the Nests of Spiders, 1947) through fantastical allegory (the Our Ancestors trilogy) to the combinatorial, constraint-based experiments of his late period. He joined OuLiPo in 1973 and spent his last decades in Paris, where the group's mathematical approach to literature transformed his work. If on a winter's night a traveler (1979) is the masterpiece of this final phase — a novel that is simultaneously a love letter to reading and a dissection of how reading works. He died in 1985 of a cerebral hemorrhage, aged 61, while preparing his Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard (published posthumously as Six Memos for the Next Millennium).
Italo Calvino at a glance
Works
If on a winter's night a traveler
1979 · 260 pages · ★★★★★ Expert
A novel about the act of reading that makes you fall in love with reading — and with the impossibility of ever finishing anything.
Invisible Cities
1972 · 165 pages · ★★★★☆ Advanced
Marco Polo describes 55 impossible cities to Kublai Khan — and every one of them is Venice. Every one of them is you.
Diction Across Works
experimental-lyrical
lyrical-philosophical