Word: proses
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...examine the strange bric-a-brac of our day. Unlike Jay McInerney--whose debut novel, Bright Lights, Big City, was a dirge devoid of rebirth, and set in the heart of the New World jungle, New York City--Chabon retains a Midwestern sensibility and even-mindedness. Chabon's prose can be as funny as McInerney's, but its message is more cheerful...
ACCORDING to his widow, who prepared this volume, Italo Calvino considered many options for the title of this collection before he hit on the word "memos." For an American, the word has unpleasant associations--the torpid prose of bureaucrats and administrators, whose spell-check word processors restrict their vocabularies--but one can see how it would appeal to a European intellectual like Calvino. It has a soothing alliteration, and its etymology--an abbreviation of "memorandum," something "to be remembered"--implies history...
Harvard invited Calvino, the author of Cosmicomics, If on a winter's night a traveller, and Invisible Cities, to deliver the Norton lectures for 1985-86. Calvino conceived the lectures as memos, terse essays about aspects of prose style that had marked his own fiction and would be important for the literature of the future. Calvino identified six qualities: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. At his death, on the eve of his departure for America, he had written and completed the first five of these lectures...
...Memos for the Next Millenium is a slim and dense book. Calvino discusses every form of narrative, from the prose poems of Francis Ponge and the micro-essays of Jorge Luis Borges (quickness) to the encyclopedic and incomplete novels of Robert Musil and Carlo Emilio Gadda (multiplicity). He addresses a variety of literary problems. In his essay on visibility, for example, he contrasts visual and verbal imaginations, examining the prefabricated images of the mass media and their control over how we create pictures from words and words from pictures...
...Memos will be vital to any student of Calvino because it reveals the careful rationales that motivated his experiments in literature, from the mathematically organized prose-poems of Invisible Cities to the "hypernovel" If on a winter's night a traveller. The connection between Calvino's theory and his own work is also a limitation. As Calvino confesses, his own writing determined his choice of literary qualities for the next millenium...