Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Italo Calvino

“Certainly no one has written so well about that gifted and nimble Italian genius of the short prose narrative Italo Calvino as has the master himself in these five highly personal meditations on the art of writing, originally intended for the 1985-1986 Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard before death intervened early that same fall with a swift startling stroke. The very titles here--’Lightness,’ ’Quickness,’ ’Exactitude,’ ’Visibility,’ ’Multiplicity’--amount to a recital of Calvino’s most admired characteristics, qualities echoed here in Patrick Creagh’s sensitive translation. A sixth--Calvino’s provocative open-endedness--is ironically provided by the absence of the unwritten final lecture, which was to have been ’Consistency.’...While each of these literary values is distinct, each seems at the same time to embrace the others, ’visibility’ emerging from ’lightness,’ ’exactitude’ making ’quickness’ possible, all the qualities caught up in ’multiplicity’s’ net or in ’visibility’s’ inner eye--it’s a kind of magic act resembling the threading of the cosmos on an endless loop through the eye of a needle--in such a way that summary images of the art of writing, at least that practiced by Calvino himself, are to be found on almost every page...And if I were to choose a quintessential image for the author of such crystalline models of ’weightless gravity’ as ’The Nonexistent Knight,’ ’Cosmicomics,’ ’Invisible Cities’ and ’If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler’--classics of this millennium that the next will surely cherish--out of the many here, I would perhaps choose this one, the leaping poet. It seems to me a whole aesthetic is hidden away in it, and a biography as well.”—Robert Coover, New York Times Book Review

“A reader must delight in the way that Calvino convokes Ovid, Dante, Shakespeare, Balzac, Henry James, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, Musil, Borges, and also computer science, Felix the Cat, rebuses, and tarot cards...He details his aesthetic penchants and proclivities with a lucidity that leaves most of his critics looking fuzzy and extraneous.”—Brad Leithauser, New York Review of Books

“We read the lectures [Calvino] was to have given at Harvard--light, graceful, self-mocking prophecies and promises made on literature’s behalf--as fragile last words...[There is] a special kind of enchantment once we realize what Calvino is doing...[His] gift is not for seeing two sides to a question, but for seeing how a question conceals other, endlessly shifting and multiplying questions, and even some unlikely answers; for seeing how a word can drift among a family of meanings...Calvino’s larger arguments are casual, but his insights are not. Or to put it another way, Calvino’s topics are less important than what they permit. They permit, for example, a beautifully paced account of his own reading, a record of cherished books and images, which amounts to a discreet fragment of autobiography.”—Michael Wood, New Republic

“Calvino’s lectures, his shining literary testament, crystallize the spirit that has produced his work. Characteristically, it takes a symbol, artfully constructed tale or character, and rotates it prismlike, so that it catches all kinds of new lights. Calvino is as entrancing as a theorist as he is a tale-teller; his lectures contain flights of thought that are dazzling...Each of the many facets of Calvino’s discourse is set at an angle that seems to exist by itself; but taken together, they are their own single and resonating crystal.”—Richard Eder, Los Angeles Times Book Review

“This is really a testament to the quiet authority of Calvino’s manner, the fruit of his lifelong endeavor to ’remove weight...from language’ which makes his prose so unassuming and at the same time so persuasive.”—Jonathan Coe, London Review of Books

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