Italo Calvino at 100

At a party in London recently, an Italian man asked me what I was working on. To my reply that I was writing a review of Italo Calvino’s nonfiction, he said the mere thought of reading Calvino gave him an erection. “That’s very Italian,” I thought.

Italy loves its authors. Two years ago, when a German newspaper printed a column criticizing Dante, the outcry among Italians reached the Cabinet in Rome, with the minister of culture urging people to ignore the column. And when Calvino died in 1985, the whole country went into mourning. Gore Vidal recalled that the Italian president had visited Calvino to say his farewells and that “each day for two weeks, bulletins from the hospital at Siena were published.”

Calvino was born on Oct. 15, 1923, in Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba. Nicely timed for that centenary, Mariner Books is publishing “The Written World and the Unwritten World” (translated by Ann Goldstein), a collection of Calvino’s essays, reviews, forewords, letters, and lectures.

It brings together his thoughts on everything from the publishing business to cannibalism. The title is rather cumbersome (like his famous novel “If on a winter’s night a traveler”), but Calvino’s writing is marvelously lithe.

This is the seventh nonfiction Calvino collection translated into English, and by now, we’ve reached the scraps. To be sure, there’s still much to savor, but some of the pieces are a little meager. It is perhaps OK to include a short, forgettable essay on character names, but is it really merited to have several pages listing the titles in series published by Einaudi (Calvino’s employer)? Still, even the slighter pieces have their charm.

As an essayist, Calvino makes you feel personally addressed. His prose is conversational, witty without being showy, as though you had the good fortune of talking to him in a bar. Like any raconteur, he loves to digress. He saves some of the richest passages for these asides — explaining, for example, what the Saint-Simonians meant by “love” or why the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 didn’t herald a crisis in engagee literature. Calvino broke with the Italian Communist Party over Hungary. But though there is not much politics in the collection under review — look to “Eremita a Parigi” (1994; Hermit in Paris) for that — he brings it up on occasion. Thus, he writes that “I wanted to be the Communist Chesterton.” Someone capable of saying that couldn’t have toed the Stalinist line forever.

One of the pleasures of reading essays written by novelists is that you get a view onto their fiction.

The book’s fourth part thus lets us read what Calvino, the doyen of fantastical literature, had to say about that genre. Surveying the Grail myth, Giambattista Basile’s Pentamerone, and Poe’s works, he concludes that the key to writing good fantastical stories is to have a rational cast of mind — much like, I guess, no good illusionist believes that magic is real. “I love Kafka,” Calvino writes, “because he’s a realist.”

The other thing one needs is a sense of irony and paradox: Calvino was often called a “fabulist” writer, but he too had a strong realist streak. In the essay “The Fates of the Novel,” Calvino writes that the grand 19th-century novel has had its day. The 20th century is the century of “the lyric style of the short novel.” It is to books like Faulkner’s “The Old Man” that one must look for inspiration. Calvino writes that “since the day I read it I’ve understood that either we write like that or fiction is condemned to become a minor art form.” He concedes that there are a few lone exceptions. “Someone will object: There is Thomas Mann. Yes, he understood everything, or almost, about our world, but he was leaning out over the last banister of the nineteenth century. We’re looking at the world as we fall into the stairwell.” Time has, I think, proved that a few banisters remain — I mean, Karl Ove Knausgaard didn’t write his 3,500-page extravaganza while falling through the air.

Very occasionally, Calvino resorts to inert theoretical language. Perhaps he spent too many evenings studying French semiotics. (Can one spend too few evenings studying semiotics?)

Thus, he puts on paper such barbarisms as “mimetic-objective representation.” Worse than incomprehensible, this is boring.

But Calvino had far too much respect for language to let such lapses become frequent. Giacomo “Leopardi’s miracle was to subtract so much weight from language that it came to resemble moonlight,” Calvino wrote in his first posthumous collection. Leopardi, he wrote in an essay that appears in the new collection, pointed toward a language with “maximum effect with minimum means.” That could in fact be said of Calvino’s own prose. But he knew that good writing required a constant struggle. Language, he wrote, “has been struck by a kind of plague,” becoming increasingly abstract and euphemistic. “The writer’s task is to fight this plague, ensure the survival of a direct, concrete language, but the problem is that everyday language, until yesterday the living source that writers could resort to, can no longer avoid infection.” Calvino, by recognizing that he wasn’t immune to the corruption of language, emerged triumphant.