Calvino

To favor Metalious over Calvino is so alien to me I can't understand why serious people could even consider it, her potential as cash flow notwithstanding.

Writing and Publishing

I've had proof in the past that Italo Calvino is an excellent writer, but one of the reasons why this book did not work for me at this particular point in time is the fact that most of the several beginnings of stories completely failed to captivate me.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino

But maybe I am getting the experience of reading confused with the actual quality Calvino is talking about.

Memos « So Many Books

Orienation and desorientation come together in Calvino’s writing like a single match up of day and night in Italian cities transformed into imaginary havens for would be writers and poets, but also gardners and flower pickers, never mind dogs and squirrels and students preferring to drink bitter wine.

italo calvino | if on a winter’s night a traveler « poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground

The vast forests and luxuriant fauna omnipresent in Calvino’s early fiction such as The Baron in the Trees derives from this “legacy”.

italo calvino | if on a winter’s night a traveler « poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground

Calvino is clearly the author of the letters, but he wrote them to De’ Giorgi and so shouldn’t she have the right to do with them as she pleases?

Who Owns Letters? « So Many Books

Seen from the point of view of philosophy, it suggests to me an approach to thinking recalls Calvino's passage where he writes of words as a

thinkBuddha.org

Disdainful of Turin students, Calvino saw himself as enclosed in a “provincial shell” that offered the illusion of immunity from the Fascist nightmare: “We were ‘hard guys’ from the provinces, hunters, snooker-players, show-offs, proud of our lack of intellectual sophistication, contemptuous of any patriotic or military rhetoric, coarse in our speech, regulars in the brothels, dismissive of any romantic sentiment and desperately devoid of women.”

italo calvino | if on a winter’s night a traveler « poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground

Now twenty years old, Calvino refused military service and went into hiding.

italo calvino | if on a winter’s night a traveler « poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground

In 1962 Calvino met the Argentinian translator Esther Judith Singer (Chichita) and married her in 1964 in Havana, during a trip in which he visited his birthplace and met Ernesto Che Guevara.

italo calvino | if on a winter’s night a traveler « poetry dispatch & other notes from the underground