Word: calvino
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...Italo Calvino...
...best proof of the inherent eccentricity of existence--this week's best proof, anyway--is that Italo Calvino, revered author of If on a winter's night a traveler and other classics of post-modern literature, began by writing neo-realistic stories of the Italian Resistance. In the recently retranslated and re-released The Path to the Spiders' Nests, Calvino tells the story of Pin, a street urchin. Pin, mischievous and impish and all those other cute things we expect of urchins, lives a difficult life. (This too we expect, although Pin's life has cruder aspects than most...
...makes his art according to their ideas of rhizomes and machines. His constructions are rhizomatic: they are perpetually in the middle, ready to be reworked, almost self-consciously transient. CDs may be scratched and rebuilt ad infinitum. Popp's work is suspiciously reminiscent of the sculptor in Italo Calvino's If On A Winter's Night, A Traveler who builds sculptures out of books, then builds new sculptures out of the books written about his sculpture...
PAUL AUSTER, 47, HAS won a cult following in the U.S. and occasional best- seller status in Europe by playing new tricks with established literary forms. He mixes some of the experimental whimsy of a Borges or a Calvino with the narrative drive that made old-fashioned stories so appealing in the first place. When he riffs on detective fiction, for example, as he does in the novels that constitute his New York Trilogy -- City of Glass (1985), Ghosts and The Locked Room (both 1986) -- he sees to it that readers craving mystery, as well as or instead of Postmodernist...
...again, Schami's narrative tactic seems more like salesmanship. He uses this structure not for any purpose so much as to revel in it for its sake. Modern authors like Calvino use a similar framework to lay bare all the peculiar social and intellectual conventions of reading , to strike at the very heart of our understanding of narrative, to unravel the fabric of reality-to bring the universe of perception to its knees. Schami uses it because it's cool and exotic...