Word: calvino
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...interested in Shakespeare, won't listen to Stravinsky -- and it's because of television, Hollywood, all the meretricious easy-access audiovisual crud. In fact, a strain of cerebral artiness is suddenly proliferating in the mainstream, a funny autodeconstruction that in the past decade has moved from European literature (Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler), to West End theater (Michael Frayn's Noises Off), to quality American pop: it is at the core of The Larry Sanders Show on HBO, MTV's Beavis and Butt-head and the new Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle, Last Action Hero. Such...
...devising a story, therefore, the first thing that comes to my mind is an image," explained Italo Calvino, Italy's master fabulist, shortly before his death in 1985. Some of his images -- like that of the boy philosophe who scrambled up an oak and never descended again in The Baron in the Trees -- became the emblems of masterpieces. But Calvino also crafted stories from even more pared-down beginnings. He built that dazzling picaresque of the mind, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, from just the thought of an activity: reading. The protagonist has every book he begins...
Under the Jaguar Sun, a slender collection of three stories, grew from simpler roots still. Calvino's intention was to write a book about the five senses. Though the sequence is incomplete, each story continues Calvino's lifelong campaign to add more territory to the empire of the imagination; each discloses marvels in regions that were presumed exhausted...
...Calvino explores hearing and smell with comparable insight and deftness. In A King Listens, a monarch whose power depends on his remaining glued to his ! throne becomes a paranoiac, his mind an echo chamber of suspicion, as he is deprived of all stimuli -- save for the aural -- from beyond his hall. And in The Name, the Nose, three characters try to track down unknown women whose odors have intoxicated them...
...What Calvino would have done with sight and touch the reader can only conjecture. That he or she will want to do so is just the sort of twist that Calvino, one of the century's greatest imaginers, would have loved...