Customer Reviews (1)

A child's view of the trauma of WWII torn Italy
Italo Calvino is an artist in many different meanings of that word. But his first book, _The Path to the Nest of Spiders_, brings another view to the author. Told from the perspective of the child, Calvino is able to use his fantastic style, as well as his earthy analysis of the situations that arise. The Characters are both real and symbols, from the Sister who shares her bed each night, to the cook that is both an anarchist and a father to the boy. Calvino is truly a master at his craft, and this book shows where he came from, and how he is able to see the world and write about it ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Understanding Italo Calvino
This is an excellent addition to the already large body of work about the author. ... Read more

Product Description
The Oulipo was founded in 1960 by a group of leading French writers and mathematicians, it still meets regularly some thirty five years later, making it one of the longest lived and productive literary groupings ever.

The Oulipo’s original aim was to inquire into the possibilities of combining literature and mathematics, but this field of study was soon expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems. Remarkable Oulipian works have been written by Queneau, Calvino, Perec, Roubaud, Mathews (to mention only those familiar to English-speaking readers).

The group publishes a series of small booklets for circulation among its friends. This anthology reproduces six of them in English facsimile, from among the earliest (no. 3, 1976) to the most recent (no. 70, 1995); it provides the English reader with a taste at least of one of the most sustained and intriguing literary investigations of recent years. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (2)

Reformatting The Muse
Founded in late 1960 in France, at a colloquium on the work of Raymond Queneau, in order to research new writing by combining mathematics and literature (and also to just horse around) the Oulipo (The Ouvrior de LittÈrature Potentielle or Oulipo (The Workshop of Potential Literature)) expanded to include all writing using self-imposed restrictive systems.

Potential Literature, to me, seems an extension of Surrealism, which used the methods of literary production to critique modernism's obsession with the literary artifact; instead of the myth of the artist alone in some garret painstakingly crafting a Work of Art, literature is automatically generated by timed writing, or mechanically generated by multiple authors with games like the Exquisite Corpse or pieced together in a collage of found text. The Oulipo extends this the critique of modernism by exploring ways that literature can be produced as a result of mathematical formulas, or by building complex rules that limit writer's potential choices, or by the construction of new literary forms.

This book serves as a short introduction to the methods of potential literature several reprints from the groups pamphlet series, including François Le Lionnais's Manifestos and Italo Calvino's essay "How I Wrote One of My Books," which served as the blue print for If On a Winter's Nigh a Traveler.

Oulipo is a body of generative ideas rather than a critical or analytical method. It does away with philosophical underpinning in favor of just generating writing. Raymond Queneau regretted that writer's didn't use tools like other craftsmen. With word-processors, they do and this text supplies a range of techniques for extending mechanical writing beyond spell check. The muse has had her hard drive reformatted.

Absolutely Hilarious
This book is a riot!I highly recommend it.All of the texts are funny but Fornel's Suburbia is the funniest produced yet by the Oulipians. In addition, this book is a good introduction to the aesthetics of Oulipo, agroup of writers who are underappreciated by the American audience. ... Read more

Product Description
La publicacion de estas paginas autobiograficas ineditas aclara y precisa muchos de los aspectos mas importantes de la vida y la personalidad de Italo Calvino: su infancia, su lucha partisana durante la Segunda Guerra Mundial, su militancia politica en el comunismo, luego su alejamiento y decepcion, las relaciones con los escritores de su epoca y el camino que le llevo a la literatura.La primera parte del libro pertenece a una carpeta guardada hasta ahora y que, con el titulo Paginas autobiograficas, llega hasta 1980. Lo completan dos textos entranables y reveladores: Ermitano en Paris y Diario norteamericano (1959-1960). El primero es una delicada dedicatoria llena de amor a Paris, ciudad de la que no se apartaria a lo largo de toda su vida, y de la que se iria apropiando a traves de la lectura de muchos libros inolvidables: Los tres mosqueteros, Los miserables, Baudelaire, Balzac, Proust... Aparentemente el Diario norteamericano es una serie de cartas enviadas a un amigo sobre las impresiones y experiencias de su viaje. Pero no es solo eso: la curiosidad, la sensibilidad, la ironia, el analisis ilustrado, benevolo y severo a la vez, se vuelcan en la mirada lucida de Calvino sobre aquella sociedad de hace mas de treinta anos, ofreciendo al lector un fresco divertido, critico y, en muchos aspectos, muy actual de una sociedad tan variada y contradictoria como era y es la norteamericana. ... Read more

Product Description
Las historias de Los amores dificiles, deItalo Calvino (1923-1985), versan sobre la dificultad de comunicacion entre personas que, por alguna inesperada circunstancia, podrian comenzar una relacion amorosa. En realidad, son historias sobre como una pareja no alcanza nunca a establecer ese minimo vinculo afectivo inicial, aunque todo parezca favorecerlo. Pero, para Italo Calvino, en ese desencuentro reside no solo el motivo de una desesperacion, sino tambien el elemento fundamental o la esencia misma de la relacion amorosa. ... Read more

Product Description
Although never named as such, the landscape of Sanremo was a constant visual source for Calvino's fiction. In its recognizable pattern of sea-city-hills, it appears in sixteen works written over a period of thirty two years. This recurring theme provides both a link between some very different works and an insight into the autobiographical dimension of an author whose attitude to privacy and his past is protective but detached. Italo Calvino and the Landscape of Childhood is an analysis of the criteria of representative (and of representational distortion) of a descriptive motif.Claudia Nocentini is a Lecturer in Italian at the University of Edinburgh. In addition to articles on Calvino she has published studies on Natalia Ginzburg and Gianni Celati. ... Read more

Product Description
This is the first study in English of Italo Calvino's complete works. It follows the publication of the collected fiction and nonfiction, and provides the most up-to-date account of his work available. Martin McLaughlin's access to unpublished material enables him to chart Calvino's evolution from (neo)realist to postmodernist. Calvino's intertextual links with major writers such as Conrad, Stevenson, Hemingway and Borges are analyzed in detail in this definitive account of Italy's greatest post-war prose writer. ... Read more

Customer Reviews (1)

Readable, sometimes entertaining, but lacking depth.
The title alone suggests--at least, to this reader--that one would encounter, in this book, an accessible introduction to Calvino's works that avoids scholarly babble on the one hand and boring plot synopsis on the other. But, alas, the reader who expects this sort of book will have tolook elsewhere. In other words, the so-called "average reader"who wants to know Calvino's works but has been intimidated by theprofessors will not find comfort in McLaughlin's book. To be sure, ITALOCALVINO: WRITERS OF ITALY is a slick, readable effort; but it leaves uswanting more depth in the analysis.

It begins at a rapid pace, and themomentum never really lets up: the biographical section in the Introduction(which sketches an interesting image of Calvino) is brief, and it lures usinto the rest of the book. But it's best to read this book for the firsttime as fast as one can, while not giving too much attention toMcLaughlin's analysis. Such an initial reading involves taking a lot ontrust; but to give the book critical scrutiny the first time through willmost likely lead the reader to irritation and boredom. Best to just get thenarrative's sense of flux, to just let McLaughlin's discussionunfold.

And what of those moments when we begin to look at this book moreclosely, especially when we finish reading a Calvino novel and we now turnto ITALO CALVINO: WRITERS OF ITALY to supplement our reading? Well, afamiliar pattern in the book emerges: We see McLaughlin offering aninteresting thematic point, raising our expectation for a good analysis,but then he doesn't take it any further. In the chapter on INVISIBLECITIES, he explores the structure of this novel, stating that "whetherone uses numbers or letters to signify the cities, it is always asymmetrical lozenge or diamond-shape structure which emerges, and whichsuggests that the top triangle of Chapter I, and the bottom triangle ofChapter IX represent complementary, regular patterns which omit theirregularities of reality--this being one of the themes of the work"(102).

"The irregularities of reality": a splendid line,really. But what does it mean? And why are these "regular patternswhich omit the irregularities of reality" one of the themes ofINVISIBLE CITIES? McLaughlin doesn't pursue the argument anyfurther.

Indeed, the book concentrates heavily on the form (structure) ofCalvino's works and seems to neglect the content. True, McLaughlin statesin the Introduction that, for Calvino, "structure was an integral partof the meaning of a literary text" (x) and that, taking Calvino's ownadvice, the "primary focus of this study" is to "discern thedifferent layers of writing beneath the uniform surface of the text"(xi).

To which we say: good Lord. For some reason this approach leaves ushanging, so to speak. As a result, we feel distant from Calvino's works; wefeel we haven't gained any insight into his novels.

I should point outthat there are inconsistencies in the translations of Italian words andbook titles. The chapter on Calvino's style has several: McLaughlinexplains that in "Senza colori (1965), 'quella tinta bituminosa' (II,1336) is rewritten as 'quella luminosita caliginosa' (II, 127)" (158).Unfortunately, this passage is meaningless to readers who don't speakItalian.

If there ever was a writer for the people, I think Italo Calvinofits that role. Fortunately, his books are available to the paperbackaudience. But this audience, of which I am a proud member, could use theguidance of a sort of pilot-commentary; a friendly companion to Calvino'sworks; a book not to be read from cover to cover but to be dipped into bynon-scholars who would like to know something about a Calvino novel. Thisis not, then, that book. There are moments when ITALO CALVINO: WRITERS OFITALY appears to be that ideal commentary--but it quickly falls short ofits potential. ... Read more

Product Description

Although Italo Calvino (1923-1985) is one of the most widely read and translated Italian novelists of the century, a comprehensive analytical work in English of his writings has been unavailable until now. In this new study Angela Jeannet offers a rich and vibrant critical portrait that integrates Calvino the creative writer with Calvino the critical thinker, two roles that the novelist himself saw as intimately connected. "Under the Radiant Sun and the Crescent Moon" examines the cultural and literary matrix of Calvino's complex fictional universe, focusing on his passion for storytelling and the various stages in the evolution of his work. Calvino lived in a culture undergoing profound transformations. Jeannet traces the important creative influences and events in his life and their significance for his writing, from his cultivated bourgeois upbringing and reading of the Modernists to his confrontation with post-war industrialism, the consumer culture of the 1960s, and beyond.

Throughout the study Jeannet brings to light Calvino's views on the function of storytelling in literature and society and his strong connections to the Italian poetic tradition. She also explores aspects of Calvino's work that deserve more attention, including the critically neglected Marcovaldo stories and the metaphorical role of the feminine in his fictional world. ... Read more