Word: calvino
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Five literature professors, two of them from Harvard, will speak at a memorial symposium today for the late Italo Calvino, the Italian author who was to give a lecture series here this fall...
...five scholars will discuss Calvino's work and ideas at 61 Kirkland St. at 8 p.m., organizer and Babbitt Professor of Comparative Literature Dante Della Terza said yesterday. The symposium is open to the public...
DIED. Italo Calvino, 61, Italian author of fanciful imagination and technical virtuosity who used surreal fables and phantasmagorical science fiction to express thoroughly modern, realistic observations on human absurdity; of complications following a stroke; in Siena, Italy. A Resistance fighter during World War II, he drew on his partisan experiences in early, realistic works like The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), but turned more and more to fantasy in such books as The Baron in the Trees (1957), Invisible Cities (1973), The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1974) and If on a Winter Night a Traveler...
...does not work, of course. But Calvino's narrative of this doomed quest succeeds admirably, in part because he, like Samuel Beckett, recognizes the comic possibilities inherent in the tailspin of logic toward the absurd. Mr. Palomar's relentless speculations render him buffoonish. Passing a woman sunbathing topless on a beach, he averts his eyes lest she cover herself and embarrass them both. On reflection, though, he decides that his behavior was incorrect, since it reinforced outmoded taboos against nudity. So he walks by again, this time taking in the bare breasts as an incidental feature in the general landscape...
...Calvino's spare narrative seems to cry out for allegorical explanations. Mr. Palomar could represent the travail of Western empiricism, in which every new discovery adds to the inexplicable. Or he might represent the last gasp of a class (European, intellectual, well-to-do) that is being smothered by the rise of the masses. None of the possible interpretations seems as interesting as the novel's deceptively plain but beguiling language. The wise reader of Mr. Palomar might best adopt a strategy that the hero formulates but fails to follow: "Perhaps the first rule I must impose on myself...