For those not interested in a tremendous amount of meaningless piffle about the article author, skip twenty paragraphs in to get the actual interview with Calvino.
One of my favorite passages of prose is from Calvino's "Invisible Cities"; I can't pass up the opportunity to share it on HN:
"When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories."
“Le città invisibili” is a multi layered book.
I’ve read it hundreds of times - just contemplate the beauty of the prose, humble, innocent, yet wise and deep. In Italian is even more astonishing.
Invisible cities was too visual for me (I have a weak visual imagination, so I can't appreciate books that rely too heavily on images), but I really liked If On A Winter's Night a Traveler, and this quote reminds me that I want to read more Calvino.
Would you (or anyone else here) recommend another book of his, given those preferences/weaknesses of mine?
Thanks! Cosmicomics rings a bell as something I'd considered reading but never got around to, and those mini-synopses on the Wikipedia page are pretty enticing.
The Castle of Crossed Destinies (Il castello dei destini incrociati), it helps having visual imagination on this too, but i think is less intensive that Invisible Cities (Città invisibili) and Marcovaldo too.
p.s. Italian here too, though i never had the chance to read much of him during highschool
If you're an English [native] speaker, The Baron in the Trees just received a very nice new English translation (published by Penguin on their Vintage Classics imprint in the UK). I love Calvino so much as an writer, but that's probably my favourite and the one I find I can recommend most successfully; it's imo more straightforward than his other more famous books, with less of the linguistic games.
So glad you posted this. Baron In The Trees is one of my favorite books and it has been so long since I read it. I'll be picking up that new translation.
"But with all this, I would not be telling you the city's true essence; for while the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave."
A friend lent me a copy of Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler" which I would strongly recommend if you're looking for something a bit different. It's written in the second person (the protagonist is you, the reader) and is alarmingly postmodern.
I think it's even enjoyable by people who would be put off by the phrase 'alarmingly postmodern'.
It's playful and weird and meta, sure, but it's not difficult (or purely an excuse for Calvino to show off), and there is sincerity not far below the surface.
Sorry, I didn't mean that as a criticism, and your message was pretty clear. I just thought that some people (possibly me, if I hadn't already read the book) might be unnecessarily put off by that final phrase.
calvino was a fascinating person and a powerful author. it's a shame he isn't more recognized in the mainstream of western literature.
he strikes me as the kind of person who is both mysterious and familiar at the same time -- someone who is wise and accessible, yet avuncular and rare to interact with. and, of course, he's deeply italian.
In general Italian Fiction, I think receives much less attention than French or Russian, at least till the end of last century, it is not easy to find translations of the Italian greats like Manzoni, Tasso, even Petrarch these days.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 82.4 ms ] thread"When a man rides a long time through wild regions he feels the desire for a city. Finally he comes to Isidora, a city where the buildings have spiral staircases encrusted with spiral seashells, where perfect telescopes and violins are made, where the foreigner hesitating between two women always encounters a third, where cockfights degenerate into bloody brawls among the bettors. He was thinking of all these things when he desired a city. Isidora, therefore, is the city of his dreams: with one difference. The dreamed-of city contained him as a young man; he arrives at Isidora in his old age. In the square there is the wall where the old men sit and watch the young go by; he is seated in a row with them. Desires are already memories."
Would you (or anyone else here) recommend another book of his, given those preferences/weaknesses of mine?
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Palomar
p.s. Italian here too, though i never had the chance to read much of him during highschool
"But with all this, I would not be telling you the city's true essence; for while the description of Anastasia awakens desires one at a time only to force you to stifle them, when you are in the heart of Anastasia one morning your desires waken all at once and surround you. The city appears to you as a whole where no desire is lost and of which you are a part, and since it enjoys everything you do not enjoy, you can do nothing but inhabit this desire and be content. Such is the power, sometimes called malignant, sometimes benign, that Anastasia, the treacherous city, possesses; if for eight hours a day you work as a cutter of agate, onyx, chrysoprase, your labor which gives form to desire takes from desire its form, and you believe you are enjoying Anastasia wholly when you are only its slave."
It's playful and weird and meta, sure, but it's not difficult (or purely an excuse for Calvino to show off), and there is sincerity not far below the surface.
he strikes me as the kind of person who is both mysterious and familiar at the same time -- someone who is wise and accessible, yet avuncular and rare to interact with. and, of course, he's deeply italian.