Description

By (author) Calvino, Italo; Translated by McLaughlin Martin; Introduction by Wood, Michael

Short /annotation:
Italy”s most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter”s Night a Traveler. This book includes a selection of about 650 letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino”s life.

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This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy”s most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter”s Night a Traveler. But he was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luciano Berio. This book includes a generous selection of about 650 letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino”s life. Selected and introduced by Michael Wood, the letters are expertly rendered into English and annotated by well-known Calvino translator Martin McLaughlin.The letters are filled with insights about Calvino”s writing and that of others; about Italian, American, English, and French literature; about literary criticism and literature in general; and about culture and politics.The book also provides a kind of autobiography, documenting Calvino”s Communism and his resignation from the party in 1957, his eye-opening trip to the United States in 1959-60, his move to Paris (where he lived from 1967 to 1980), and his trip to his birthplace in Cuba (where he met Che Guevara). Some lengthy letters amount almost to critical essays, while one is an appropriately brief defense of brevity, and there is an even shorter, reassuring note to his parents written on a scrap of paper while he and his brother were in hiding during the antifascist Resistance.This is a book that will fascinate and delight Calvino fans and anyone else interested in a remarkable portrait of a great writer at work.

Table of contents:
Introduction, by Michael Wood viiTranslator”s Note, by Martin McLaughlin xviiAbbreviations xix1941-1945 11946-1950 321951-1955 731956-1960 1111961-1965 2121966-1970 3111971-1975 3901976-1980 4611981-1985 511Notes 535Index 599

Review quote:
One of The Guardian Best Books of 2013, chosen by Pankaj Mishra Selected for the SFG Gift Guide 2013 “[C]onsistently absorbing and suggestive… [T]he chronicle not only of Calvino”s intellectual development but of postwar Italy”s… The letters in this book deal with great subtlety, sophistication, and wit, and occasionally even a certain cynicism, with challenges that might have overburdened a less mercurial, multifarious, essentially sane spirit.”–Jonathan Galassi, New York Review of Books “The image of Calvino as postmodernism”s light-footed prince follows easily. But, behind that image, who was Calvino? The publication of a considerable selection of Calvino”s letters affords an opportunity, or many opportunities, to ask that question anew.”–Lawrence Norfolk, Wall Street Journal “[T]here is no writer alive who resembles … Calvino. So the appearance of a selection of Calvino”s letters in English is a moment of happiness… [T]hese letters offer a gorgeous portrait of Calvino in the midst of his own productivity: as an editor, a reader, a critic, an inventor of new literary forms. And they allow the reader to investigate the complicated background from which those strange forms emerged.”–Adam Thirlwell, New Republic “This collection, the first in English, gives voice and witness to a vibrant mind intensely engaged in the literary and political future of postwar Italy and the history of