Its the birthday of Italian writer Italo Calvino (books by this author), born in Santiago de Las Vegas, Cuba (1923). His parents were scientists — his father an agronomist, his mother a botanist — and they were working in Cuba at the time of their sons birth, but moved back to Italy not long afterward. As a boy, he listened to the radio constantly, dreaming about the outside world. When he discovered his talent for writing, he began writing radio plays. When Calvino was 21, at the height of World War II, he joined the Italian Resistance and spent a violent 20 months fighting in the Maritime Alps. Afterward, he dropped out of college, abandoning any pretense of studying agronomy, which he had never liked anyway. He moved to Turin, and he said that his life really began there, after the war. He found a community of novelists, so he decided to write novels instead of plays. He said, If one gets used to translating into a novel ones experiences, ones ideas, what one has to say becomes a novel; one is left with no raw materials for another form of literary expression. At first, he wrote realism, like his first novel, The Path to the Nest of Spiders (1947), set during the war. He labored over three more novels, but he didnt like any of them. Finally, he made a decision. He said: I had made efforts to write the realistic-novel-reflecting-the-problems-of-Italian-society and had not managed to do so. (At the same time I was what was called a politically committed writer.) And then, in 1951, when I was 28 and not at all sure that I was going to carry on writing, I began doing what came most naturally to me. Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic. So he wrote The Cloven Viscount (1952), the story of Medardo, a 17th-century nobleman who is hit by a cannonball and cloven into two people, one good and one evil, but both only half a person. The bad Medardo wants to make everyone else miserable, and is constantly destructive; the good Medardo wants to heal everyone and everything, and spends a lot of time fixing the bad deeds of his counterpart. No one really likes either Medardo — one is too cruel, the other is so nice he makes people uncomfortable. Then the two Medardos fall in love with the same girl and end up fighting each other, and, finally, getting stitched back together. Calvino went on to write many novels that blended fantasy and reality, including The Baron in the Trees (1957), Invisible Cities (1972) and If on a winters night a traveler (1979).
Posted on: Tue, 15 Oct 2013 09:29:56 +0000