hsut@pur-ee.UUCP (Bill Hsu) (10/21/85)
For weeks, I was going to post something about Italo Calvino's death, but Bill Ingogly beat me to it. Oh well, I guess I'll post an appreciation... (hey, here's a non-SF posting for net.books!) Italo Calvino is an extremely witty and humorous writer, despite his very serious concerns about the nature of fiction and literature in general. Much of his work has fantastic elements, but these are used in novel ways to illuminate the basic problems he is addressing, the nature of the relationship between the writer and his audience and the basic nature of fiction itself. The fantastic elements are more overt in the earlier works like Cosmicomics and T zero. People who hate science fiction should not avoid these books, however, because they are not really science fiction. In my opinion, the short stories they contain are really about humorous implications and speculations of modern physics and the limitations of language and communication. All the pieces in Cosmicomics (I haven't read T zero) are very funny (just browse thru "All At A Point" in your local bookstore). The later works are more subtle, but just as entertaining. The works after The Castle of Crossed Destinies mostly address Calvino's conflicting concerns with whether fiction can be reduced to a set of basic elements, and the multiplicity of ways a text can be read. Castle of Crossed Destinies uses the Tarot deck as the basic building blocks with which Calvino builds his tales. Although the number of cards is finite, the possibilities of the text are never exhausted because the meaning of the card sequences depends on the interpretation of the reader (the narrator in the novel interprets the card sequences for the reader; hence only one interpretation is presented, and this is only the narrator's "reading" of the cards). So the same cards can mean different things, and Calvino works into his tales the myths of Oedipus and the stories of Macbeth and Hamlet, all using the Tarot deck displayed in a set pattern. Calvino's masterpiece is probably Invisible Cities. This beautiful prose poem is probably one of the best things produced in the last 50 years. The "action" takes place in a garden where Marco Polo is telling Genghis Khan about the cities he has visited, and sometimes they play chess. As in most Calvino narratives, there is no well-defined time frame --- the characters mention objects and use expressions which don't exist in their lifetimes. Here again is the opposition between reducing fiction to a finite set of elements, and generating multiple versions of the text via different interpretations. Genghis Khan tries to generate all possible models of cities using his chess pieces which Marco Polo will describe. For those who are not interested in the theoretical discussions, this novel can simply be read as many beautiful descriptions of exotic cities with outre customs. Invisible Cities is a joy to read (the translation by William Weaver is excellent). Calvino's last novel to be published before his death is If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. This is a fascinating book about authors and readers in general and the fragile nature of publication. Any specific comments about the text will give away too much, but here's a sampling of what happens in the beginning. In this book, Calvino addresses the reader directly; there is no pretense that you are not reading a book. So here's the reader crunching through the first 30 pages of the book, and Calvino tells the reader that there is a defective page --- some pages are repeated (I freaked out when I read that and actually flipped back to check... :-) ) So you, the reader (this is all part of the novel) go back to the bookstore to get a new copy, and the proprietor tells you that because of the defective copy, you have been reading a Polish novel (!!) instead of Calvino's book. So you take home a copy of the Polish novel instead, since you found it interesting. You open it and find that it's something else altogether... There is too much going on in this novel to do it justice in a paragraph. There's a quasi-spy thriller subplot, a famous Irish writer whose readers believe some extra-terrestrials will beam earth-shaking revelations to him, and novels within novels within novels. Italo Calvino is a writer with many voices and addresses important problems in modern fiction. His wit and intelligence will definitely be missed. He has some new books coming out posthumously, which I have not seen. How about some reviews, Bill Ingogly or anybody else? Bill Hsu pur-ee!hsut