Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino an Italian writer and journalist (1923-1985), one of the most inventive authors of the twentieth century, celebrated for fictions that combine fantasy, formal play and philosophical reflection. His work ranges from neorealist tales of the Italian resistance to cosmic fantasy and to experiments in which the reader and the act of reading become part of the story.

Life and Early Career

Italo Calvino was born in Santiago de las Vegas, near Havana, Cuba, on 15 October 1923, to Italian parents, a botanist and an agronomist. The family soon returned to Italy and settled in San Remo, and Calvino grew up amid a scientific and strongly secular household, an atmosphere that shaped the rational strand in his imagination.

During the Second World War he joined the partisan resistance in the hills of Liguria, an experience that marked him deeply and that supplied the material for his first novel. He studied literature at the University of Turin after the war and worked as a journalist and editor, becoming associated with the publisher Einaudi, where he remained for many years.

His first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders, appeared in 1947 and drew on his partisan experience. Other tales, collected in Adam, One Afternoon and in Our Ancestors, followed, and by the 1950s he was recognised as a leading figure among the writers of his generation, though he increasingly turned away from straightforward realism.

Fantasy and the Our Ancestors Trilogy

Calvino achieved wide recognition with a trilogy of short novels, later gathered as Our Ancestors, that retell the modern condition in the form of fables. The Cloven Viscount tells of a nobleman split in two by a cannonball, so that his good and evil halves pursue separate lives, an image of division and wholeness.

The Baron in the Trees describes a boy who takes to the trees and spends his life there, observing the world from above in a fable of independence and eccentric commitment. The Nonexistent Knight concerns an empty suit of armour that performs the duties of a perfect knight, a witty meditation on identity, performance and the gap between form and substance.

These books established his manner: light, ironic, precise and playful on the surface, serious beneath. They draw on folk tale and romance, on chivalric literature and on philosophy, and they show his preference for the fable as a vehicle for ideas that a realistic novel could not carry so gracefully.

Later Experimental Works

In the 1960s and after, Calvino turned to more radical experiments. Cosmicomics and its companion volume, t zero, narrate the history of the universe, from the big bang to the emergence of life, through the voice of an enigmatic character named Qfwfq, uniting scientific cosmology with wit and wonder in a new kind of storytelling.

Invisible Cities, published in 1972, is a sequence of imagined cities recounted by Marco Polo to the emperor Kublai Khan. It is often read as a reflection on travel, memory, desire and language, and as a meditation on Venice, the author's elective city, since all the fabled places may be aspects of a single imagined home.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveller, published in 1979, addresses the reader directly and opens ten different novels only to interrupt each after a few pages. The frame story concerns a reader trying to obtain the rest of a book, and the novel becomes a brilliant examination of reading, narrative desire and the machinery of fiction.

Ideas, Criticism and Style

Calvino thought of literature as a combination of lightness and exactitude. In his lectures, posthumously collected as Six Memos for the Next Millennium, he named the qualities he valued in writing, among them lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility and multiplicity, and he argued for these against vagueness and heaviness of spirit.

He was a tireless reader and a critic of great range. He edited collections of Italian folktales and wrote essays on literature, science and society, and he helped introduce Italian readers to writers from other traditions. His own method drew on semiotics and structuralism, on the formal inventions of the avant-garde and on the older tradition of the marvellous tale.

His fiction often reflects on the act of writing itself and on the conditions of its own making, yet it avoids mere cleverness. Behind the puzzles lies a consistent concern with how human beings make meaning out of chaos, and his work is at once intellectually intricate and hospitable, rewarding both the casual reader and the close student.

Influence and Legacy

Calvino's influence reached far beyond Italy. His fictions were admired and imitated by writers of magic realism and of postmodern experiment, and his insistence that literature could be both playful and profound helped legitimise fantasy and formal invention within serious writing. The novelist Salman Rushdie counted him among the great examples for later fiction.

He was widely translated and travelled often, living for years in Paris and later in Rome, and he lectured in the United States, where his lectures on the value of literature were composed shortly before his death. His books remain in print throughout the world and are taught in courses on narrative, modernism and the fantastic.

He died in Siena on 19 September 1985, having prepared his lectures for Harvard but not lived to deliver them. He is remembered as the most elegant of Italian experimental writers, a fabulist of science and of cities, whose work teaches with clarity and wit that the imagination is a rigorous instrument and that lightness can carry the deepest thought.

See also

• Invisible Cities
• If on a Winter's Night a Traveller
• Cosmicomics
• Italian folktales