Calvino was a member of the PCI until shortly after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 (Image Source)

Calvino is finely comic as he shows us the publisher instructing his editor in how to strike the right tone. “We are not utopians, mind you, we are practical men.” Or, “It’s a battle for an ideal.” Or, “There will not be (nor has there ever been) any contradiction between an economy in free, natural expansion and the hygiene necessary to the human organism…between the smoke of our productive factories and the green of our incomparable natural beauty….” Finally, the editorial policy is set. “We are one of the cities where the problem of air pollution is most serious, but at the same time we are the city where most is being done to counteract the situation. At the same time you understand!” By some fifteen years, Calvino anticipated Exxon’s double-talk ads on American television. Trio of stories:'Into the War', 'The Avanguardisti in Menton', 'UNPA Nights'. Into the War is Calvino at his autobiographical best, combining brilliantly recollected memory with compelling wit and perfect prose.

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From 1955 to 1958 Calvino had an affair with Italian actress Elsa De Giorgi, a married, older woman. Excerpts of the hundreds of love letters Calvino wrote to her were published in the Corriere della Sera in 2004, causing some controversy. [42] After communism [ edit ] If on a winter's night a traveller (trans. William Weaver). London: Vintage, 1998. ISBN 0-919630-23-5 The Scuola Italiana Italo Calvino, an Italian curriculum school in Moscow, Russia, is named after him. A crater on the planet Mercury, Calvino, and a main belt asteroid, 22370 Italocalvino, are also named after him. Salt Hill Journal and University of Louisville award annually the Italo Calvino Prize "for a work of fiction written in the fabulist experimental style of Italo Calvino". [59] Amerigo goes home to lunch (he has a maid who cooks and serves! Written in 1963 about the events of 1953, this is plainly a historical novel). He looks for a book to read. “Pure literature” is out. “Personal literature now seemed to him a row of tombstones in a cemetery: the literature of the living as well as of the dead. Now he sought something else from books: the wisdom of the ages or simply something that helped to understand something.” He takes a stab at Marx’s Youthful Writings. “Man’s universality appears, practically speaking, in that same universe that makes all nature man’s inorganic body…. Nature is man’s inorganic body precisely because it is not his human body.” Thus genius turns everything into itself. As Marx invented Kapital from capitalism, so Calvino turns a passage of Marx into Calvino himself: the man who drinks soup is the soup that drinks him. Wholeness is all.

The early Calvino was much like his peers Pavese and Vittorini—writers who tended to reflect the realistic storytelling of Hemingway and Dos Passos. Then Calvino moved to Paris where he found his own voice or voices and became, to a degree, infected by the French. Since the writing of Our Ancestors and the three stories that make up The Watcher, Calvino has been influenced, variously, by Barthes and the semeiologists, by Borges, and by the now old New Novel. In Cosmicomics these influences are generally benign since Calvino is too formidable and original an artist to be derailed by theoreticians or undone by the example of another creator. Nevertheless the story “A Sign in Space” comes perilously close to being altogether too reverent an obeisance to semeiology. The Watcher” is told from the third-person-singular point of view, which facilitates approaching the protagonist objectively while still revealing his thoughts. The clearest impressions in the story are those of Amerigo’s mind. Other impressions are less detailed, or vague. Though the voting officials play dramatic roles in the story, their names are not mentioned, and they are drawn in only the harshest of outlines. The major character of Lia is never seen, and her voice is heard only over the telephone, accompanied by undescribed music. All of this serves to intensify the focus on Amerigo’s thoughts and swings of mood. The world of the story is, in fact, presented only as a perception of Amerigo’s. Even the rain at the outset of the story, rather than being presented objectively, independent of Amerigo, is presented as one of his perceptions: “It looked like rain.” Soon afterward is the image of Amerigo “tilting his umbrella to one side and raising his face to the rain.” Cf. Barenghi and Bruno, "Cronologia" in Romanzi e racconti di Italo Calvino, LXXIV; and Calvino, "The Summer of '56" in Hermit in Paris, 200

Started at the peak of the race to the Moon between 1963 and 1968, it is not surprising that space and planetary science are the favorite subjects of the tales. Later stories get more into time relativity, semiotics and genetics. Considered from the point of view of science-fiction, the major difference and obstacle in such categorizing Calvino comes from his focus on the distant past and on abstract concepts instead of on the future of humanity. The most outstanding stylistic trait of the story is Calvino’s mirroring in his sentence structures the complexity of Amerigo’s thoughts. In the story’s second chapter, it is learned that At times the world’s complexity seemed to Amerigo a superimposition of clearly distinct strata, like the leaves of an artichoke; at other times, it seemed a clump of meanings, a gluey dough. In Italo Calvino’s cosmicomics, primordial beings cavort on the nearby surface of the moon, play marbles with atoms, and bear ecstatic witness to Earth’s first dawn. Exploring natural phenomena and the origins of the universe, these beloved tales relate complex scientific concepts to our common sensory, emotional, human world.