Overview
Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here - spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism - are thirty-six ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.Synopsis
From the internationally-acclaimed author of some of this century's most breathtakingly original novels comes this posthumous collection of thirty-six literary essays that will make any fortunate reader view the old classics in a dazzling new light.
Learn why Lara, not Zhivago, is the center of Pasternak's masterpiece, Dr. Zhivago, and why Cyrano de Bergerac is the forerunner of modern-day science-fiction writers. Learn how many odysseys The Odyssey contains, and why Hemingway's Nick Adams stories are a pinnacle of twentieth-century literature. From Ovid to Pavese, Xenophon to Dickens, Galileo to Gadda, Calvino covers the classics he has loved most with essays that are fresh, accessible, and wise. Why Read the Classics? firmly establishes Calvino among the rare likes of Nabokov, Borges, and Lawrence—writers whose criticism is as vibrant and unique as their groundbreaking fiction.
Publishers Weekly
Although the title suggests that this posthumous collection was cobbled together to capitalize on the latest culture wars, the great Italian novelist who died in 1985 had himself planned to compile it. The book remains an uneven hodgepodge of essays and brief introductions. In the outstanding opening essay, Calvino begins with the lighthearted remark that "classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying `I'm rereading... ' never `I'm reading,'" then goes on to show a contagious passion for great literature of all types. Reading criticism of classics, he writes, is often a waste of time; reading, savoring, and rereading them is of much greater importance. However, many of these critical studies suffer from too much deference to the texts, and too few flights of critical fancy. The high points of the collection are the title essay and longer pieces presenting overviews of the work of great writers who were Calvino's contemporaries. He begins an engaging discussion of Hemingway (written in 1954) by remarking that there were times when "Hemingway was a god. And they were good times, which I am happy to remember, without even a hint of that ironic indulgence with which we look back on youthful fashions." His accounts of authors less known to a modern American audience will leave readers eager to sample the otherwise daunting works of Francis Ponge and Eugenio Montale. Still, this collection is on the whole surprisingly lackluster; the beloved postmodernist will ultimately be better remembered for such earlier, more spirited essay collections as The Uses of Literature. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.
Editorials
From Barnes & Noble
New Memos for the MillenniumItalo Calvino was the Scheherezade of novelists. Endlessly inventive, suspenseful, and exotic, he refused to tie things up and conclude. Reading Calvino, we are like his Mr. Palomar swimming after the sun's reflection on the water: "At every stroke of his, it retreats, and never allows him to overtake it." Instead, "The swimming ego of Mr. Palomar is immersed in a disembodied world, intersections of force fields, vectoral diagrams, bands of position that converge, diverge, break up." Calvino's world is a warm, illuminated bath of possibilities. One of the multiple narrators of If on a Winter's Night a Traveler has this to say about what Calvino termed multiplicity: "I'm producing too many stories at once because what I want is for you to feel, around the story, a saturation of other stories that I could tell and maybe will tell&a space full of stories that perhaps is simply my lifetime." If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a book especially reminiscent of the 1001 nights; with its ten different novels suspended in the midst of their telling, it is most charming where it ought to be most frustrating.
But whereas Scheherezade told her Sultan endless stories in order to preserve her life, some of Calvino's best work has been published since his death in 1985. Both Six Memos for the Millennium, a brilliant résumé of his aesthetics, and the novel Mr. Palomar were published posthumously. The latest English-language addition to the Calvino canon is Why Read the Classics?,, a book of literary criticism smoothly translated from the Italian by Martin McLaughlin. Why Read the Classics? is a collection of occasional pieces—reviews and appreciations—and cannot be counted among the author's major works, but it brims with Calvino's customary intelligence and lucidity. Its title essay is particularly impressive in its offhand way, offering in six pages more brio and good sense than 20 years of American culture wars have been able to bring to the same question.
Calvino offers 14 definitions of a classic. The definitions are mordant— "1. The classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying: 'I'm rereading...', and never 'I'm reading...' "—but they are also reverent: "10. A classic is the term given to any book which comes to represent the whole universe, a book on a par with ancient talismans." Still, the great books are not to be read with excessive solemnity: "It is no use reading classics out of a sense of duty or respect, we should only read them for love." As to which books constitute the classics, they are those books "to which you cannot remain indifferent." The remaining essays of Why Read the Classics? give us an idea of which books most affected Calvino himself. Of course they also find him celebrating in other authors virtues displayed by his own works; the description of Ovid's Metamorphoses could stand at the head of Calvino's Collected Writings: "Only by accepting into his poem all the tales and the intentions behind them which flow in every direction, pushing and shoving to squeeze them into the ordered ranks of the epic's hexameters, only in this way will the poet be sure of not serving a partial design but the living multiplicity that does not exclude any known or unknown god."
"Ordered ranks" is a decisive phrase in this credo. Calvino's multiplicity is never a chaos. For all their playfulness, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler and Invisible Cities are fuguelike mathematical elaborations. In the latter book, Marco Polo often recounts his fantastic travels to Kublai Khan in the language of a scientist. Of a city suspended above the earth on stilts, he says: "There are three hypotheses about the inhabitants of Baucis: that they hate the earth; that they respect it so much that they avoid all contact; that they love it as it was before they existed and with spyglasses and telescopes aimed downward they never tire of examining it, leaf by leaf, stone by stone, ant by ant, contemplating with fascination their own absence." Such beautiful writing not only has deservedly become classic in itself, but it exemplifies the classical rhetorical virtues Calvino exalted in his Six Memos for the Next Millennium: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. He does not mention grace, but it is one of the special features of his work that extreme self-consciousness about reading and writing becomes, rather than a source of awkwardness, an embodiment of assurance and ease. Calvino was at once a metafictionalist, at home in the postmodern welter of possibilities, and someone whom Cicero probably would have read with great pleasure and recognition. The publication of Why Read the Classics? provides a fine occasion for discovering or returning to Calvino's books as the fresh classics they are.
—Benjamin Kunkel
Benjamin Kunkel is a freelance writer who lives in New York City.
Publishers Weekly -
Although the title suggests that this posthumous collection was cobbled together to capitalize on the latest culture wars, the great Italian novelist who died in 1985 had himself planned to compile it. The book remains an uneven hodgepodge of essays and brief introductions. In the outstanding opening essay, Calvino begins with the lighthearted remark that "classics are those books about which you usually hear people saying `I'm rereading... ' never `I'm reading,'" then goes on to show a contagious passion for great literature of all types. Reading criticism of classics, he writes, is often a waste of time; reading, savoring, and rereading them is of much greater importance. However, many of these critical studies suffer from too much deference to the texts, and too few flights of critical fancy. The high points of the collection are the title essay and longer pieces presenting overviews of the work of great writers who were Calvino's contemporaries. He begins an engaging discussion of Hemingway (written in 1954) by remarking that there were times when "Hemingway was a god. And they were good times, which I am happy to remember, without even a hint of that ironic indulgence with which we look back on youthful fashions." His accounts of authors less known to a modern American audience will leave readers eager to sample the otherwise daunting works of Francis Ponge and Eugenio Montale. Still, this collection is on the whole surprisingly lackluster; the beloved postmodernist will ultimately be better remembered for such earlier, more spirited essay collections as The Uses of Literature. (Sept.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Library Journal
In 36 essays, Calvino--whose works are classics themselves--explores the importance of writers from Homer to Hemingway--to Borges! Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.Ryan
Italo Calvino's mind is endlessly fascinating.—The Hungry Mind Review