Word: calvino
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Evoking the teasing style of Italian authors such as Italo Calvino or Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa, Martel leads his reader on a chase through a house of mirrors. “Beatrice and Virgil” is slyly autobiographical and self-referential. It begins by telling the story of an author named Henry and his struggles to get his latest opus published. He has written a dual book and essay that seek to bring the Holocaust out of the stultifying realm of historical narrative and first-hand accounts into the realm of fiction. According to Henry, it is only...
Critics have aptly compared Mason to the experimental novelist Italo Calvino; the looping path of “The Lost Books of The Odyssey” calls to mind the continual beginnings of Calvino’s “If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler,” and the distorted views of Venice in “Invisible Cities” find their match in Mason’s ever-refracted portrait of Odysseus. Both authors leave the reader with the task of sorting through their sketches. Like Calvino, Mason trades in shadows...
Also like Calvino, Mason prefers puzzles to set truths. For that reason, his novel goes beyond a simple adaptation of a classic text. In his essay “Why Read the Classics?” Calvino once wrote, “A classic is a book which with each rereading offers as much a sense of discovery as the first reading.” Mason’s reimagining takes such discovery to heart. He himself may be aware of the similarities between his and the Italian author’s work. Many of his plot twists recall Calvino?...
Many were baffled or repelled by this unique sensibility--Ballard boasted for years that a publisher's reader had once described him as "beyond psychiatric help." Others were mesmerized. Critics came to rank him with Kafka, Italo Calvino, Stanislaw Lem, Jorge Luis Borges and William Burroughs...
...Lhasa: Streets with Memories, by Robert Barnett, is, on its surface, a meditation on the city's past and future by a lecturer at Columbia University in New York, who draws heavily on such cultural icons as Roland Barthes, Walter Benjamin and Italo Calvino. But underneath the high-toned exterior, it is something much more interesting: Barnett spends part of each year in Lhasa, and appears in no hurry to alienate his Chinese hosts; at the same time, he was one of the few foreigners to witness the demonstrations Tibetans staged in Lhasa in 1987, and so can understand...