In his journey as a writer, Italo Calvino progressed from post-war neorealism to fantastical narratives to experimental literature in his later period
prompts many reflections: on the change in literary tastes and standards since the writer’s heyday as well as the brevity of human existence. Around conference tables in publishing houses, a question that might often be pondered is how to turn an anniversary into revenue.
“The Written World and the Unwritten World” opens with an engagingly whimsical rumination on holiday reading. What follows is a long section on writing and translating that will doubtless be of interest to students and scholars of mid-20th-century Italian literature, yet of less appeal to those who merely enjoy reading Calvino. This is where the anthology shows its age.
The great Italian fabulist possessed a wry sense of humour; a reader might even suspect the author is having a laugh at his or her expense. Reviewing “Cannibals and Kings”, a study of 1977 by Marvin Harris, an anthropologist, Calvino is in his element. On the Aztecs’ enthusiasm for human sacrifice, he admits earnestly to “an impression of waste that no spiritual implication and no cultural functionality could balance”.
Calvino has been variously celebrated as the European cousin of the magical realists and as a herald of post-modernism. But, as an American scholar once noted, he gave to art, including literature, a broader mission than the post-modernists: an exploratory role.
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