🪴 GoDeep
Search
← University Challenge
Portrait of Italo Calvino

Literature · Novelists

Italo Calvino

1923–1985 · Italian

Neorealism, then fabulism and Oulipo

Italo Calvino began as a neorealist writing out of his experience as a partisan, and became the most playful and formally inventive of modern Italian novelists. His books include a trilogy of fables about a viscount split in two, a boy who never comes down from the trees and an empty suit of armour; a catalogue of imaginary cities described by Marco Polo to Kublai Khan; and a novel in the second person made of ten interrupted first chapters. He died in Siena before he could deliver the Harvard lectures published as Six Memos for the Next Millennium.

How to spot them

  • ▸Born in Cuba, raised at San Remo; a partisan in the Garibaldi Brigades
  • ▸A member of the French experimental group Oulipo from 1973
  • ▸The Our Ancestors trilogy of fables; Qfwfq the cosmic narrator
  • ▸Editor at Einaudi in Turin, and the collector of Italian Folktales
  • ▸The lecture titles: Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility, Multiplicity

Key works

The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947)

His first novel: the boy Pin joins a partisan band in Liguria

The Cloven Viscount (1952)

Medardo di Terralba is split down the middle by a Turkish cannonball, and the two halves, one wholly wicked and one unbearably good, return home separately

The Baron in the Trees (1957)

Cosimo Piovasco di Rondò climbs into the trees at twelve after refusing a dish of snails, and never sets foot on the ground again

The Nonexistent Knight (1959)

Agilulf, a paladin of Charlemagne who is an empty suit of white armour animated by willpower alone

Cosmicomics (1965)

Stories narrated by the immortal Qfwfq, each springing from a scientific proposition about the early universe

Invisible Cities (1972)

Marco Polo describes fifty-five fantastic cities, all of them named after women, to an ageing Kublai Khan

If on a winter's night a traveler (1979)

A novel in the second person in which the Reader and Ludmilla chase the beginnings of ten books that all break off

Six Memos for the Next Millennium (1988)

The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures he was preparing when he died; five of the six were written

Key ideas

  • Lightness as a literary value — Perseus carrying the Medusa's head by looking only at her reflection
  • Combinatorial writing: novels generated by tarot packs, city catalogues or interrupted openings
  • The fable as a way of writing about modern division, abstraction and absence

Quick-fire facts

  • •Born on 15 October 1923 at Santiago de las Vegas in Cuba, to Italian botanist parents, and raised in San Remo
  • •He fought with the Garibaldi Brigades in the Ligurian resistance
  • •He worked for the publisher Einaudi in Turin for much of his career
  • •His Italian Folktales (1956) collected and retold two hundred tales from across Italy
  • •He joined the Ouvroir de littérature potentielle, Oulipo, in Paris in 1973, alongside Raymond Queneau and Georges Perec
  • •The Castle of Crossed Destinies (1973) generates its stories from the cards of two tarot packs
  • •He resigned from the Italian Communist Party in 1957 after the Soviet invasion of Hungary
  • •He died of a cerebral haemorrhage in Siena on 19 September 1985, weeks before he was to give the Norton Lectures at Harvard
  • •Of the six planned memos, Lightness, Quickness, Exactitude, Visibility and Multiplicity were written; the sixth, on Consistency, was not

Drill it — 9 cards

1 / 9new card

Sources