![]() Interestingly for me, Virginia Woolf still isn’t one of these scared cows. He’s one of those writers who we’re tempted to pretend to like more than we really do, like Proust and Joyce, for fear of revealing some intellectual inadequacy. Calvino’s deployment of these telling details is probably this book’s most stellar achievement and what makes it such a joy to read.Ĭalvino is one of the sacred cows of literature. Sometimes it’s these kinds of details that bring a place alive for us. There are times when it’s much more rewarding to watch a man bump a barrow down the steps of a nondescript bridge than gaze blankly at the façade of San Marco. You need them to understand something of the true nature of the city. One of the wonders of Venice now is the people who live there. Venice has almost been turned into a romance theme park – it’s called upon to provide a standard collection of microwaved emotions as efficiently as an atm provides cash. They stare at their phones while walking across Piazza della Signoria. It’s become how they distinguish themselves from the tourist. Florentines are famous for never looking at the city’s monuments. He’s brilliant at capturing the deep division of perspective between the tourist and long term inhabitant. Calvino is constantly making the point that every city is essentially what we bring to it. We’re all hungry for new discoveries, new exotic possessions. He’s also a warlord, and by inference every warlord intent on conquering new territory is a tourist and every tourist is a warlord in embryo. Kublai Khan is the audience, the vicarious tourist. And we all as tourists need an audience to show the images of our travels to. This is probably the greatest book ever written about tourism, about the urge to escape the confines of where we live. But it’s no less clunky in Italian - L'inferno dei viventi non è qualcosa che sarà se ce n'è uno – you can’t blame the translator for translating it word for word instead of trying to improve the fluency of Calvino’s prose. ![]() Now and again the writing seemed a bit clunky – “The inferno of the living is not something that will be if there is one, it is what is already here.” That “if there is one” is a bit of an eyesore. A little bit of the magic fades but in compensation you notice lots of wonders you missed the first time. Reading this for a second time is a bit like visiting Venice for a second time. I remember a line from a novel I read where a character gazing out at the Grand Canal says, “I keep wondering when all this will happen to me.” Perhaps that’s it, Venice articulates some deep desire we all have or evokes a memory of something that has never quite happened. It’s not a moment I can or even want to explain. I’m not sure why this moment means so much to me. I sit on the steps and let all the activity on the canal wash through me. The moment of walking out of the station of Santa Lucia and beholding the Grand Canal. I catch the night train to Venice and not Florence for one moment. So usually when I return to Italy after visiting London I catch the train to Paris and then the night train to Venice. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language." He wrote: " My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". His style is not easy to classify much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales ( Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation ( Difficult Loves, for example). His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979). ![]() He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy.
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