Word: calvino
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...Italo Calvino, quite possibly the best Italian novelist alive, is one of those storytellers who hold the mirror up to nature and then write about the mirror. The scholarly collector of Italian Folktales, Calvino can leave an impression that he would give anything to escape his self-conscious world of double takes and write a simple, earthy "Once upon a time ..." When an interviewer inquired about the intention of If on a winter's night a traveler, Calvino answered: "I would like people to feel that beyond the written word is the multiplicity and unforeseeable aspect of life...
...Calvino's latest novel is, in fact, an act of the imagination about ten acts of the imagination-gathering the fragments of ten separate novels into one. Says the author: "By having so many literary models, I was trying to say that the world is so rich and inexhaustible that writings can never keep up with it." Perhaps not, but Calvino makes a manly effort. It all begins with that traveler on that winter's night in a railroad station. Outside, much fog. Inside, much steam from the espresso machine. Suddenly the reader stumbles into the kitchen realism...
...play detective in his mystery of the mixed-up book, Calvino enlists a couple of readers: an unnamed male addressed only as "you" and a charming novel addict named Ludmilla, also known as the Other Reader. In the course of tracking down clues, the readers interview a senescent professor, an editor of a publishing house who talks like a rejection slip and a confirmed nonreader who glues books shut and applies a coat of varnish, thereupon producing pop sculptures...
...this time anything seems possible except that Calvino, 57, now an editor of the Turin house Giulio Einaudi Editore, was once a Marxist, a veteran of the World War II Resistance, who believed, in his youth, that literature should be dedicated to "political engagement," to "social battle...
Whether improvising at science fiction (Cosmicomics) or medieval legends (The Castle of Crossed Destinies), Calvino has always had a way of getting serious about his own jokes. If on a winter's night a traveler is no exception. He may begin by grimacing wittily over books that make themselves more important than life, but he ends up proving in spite of himself that books are life. His antic critique turns into a love letter on the wry but irresistible pleasure of reading...