This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary
letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century.
Italy's most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985)
achieved worldwide fame with such books as "Cosmicomics,"
"Invisible Cities," and "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler." But he
was also an influential literary critic, an important literary
editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included
Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia
Ginzburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luciano
Berio. This book includes a generous selection of about 650
letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino's
life. Selected and introduced by Michael Wood, the letters are
expertly rendered into English and annotated by well-known Calvino
translator Martin McLaughlin.
The letters are filled with insights about Calvino's writing and
that of others; about Italian, American, English, and French
literature; about literary criticism and literature in general; and
about culture and politics. The book also provides a kind of
autobiography, documenting Calvino's Communism and his resignation
from the party in 1957, his eye-opening trip to the United States
in 1959-60, his move to Paris (where he lived from 1967 to 1980),
and his trip to his birthplace in Cuba (where he met Che Guevara).
Some lengthy letters amount almost to critical essays, while one is
an appropriately brief defense of brevity, and there is an even
shorter, reassuring note to his parents written on a scrap of paper
while he and his brother were in hiding during the antifascist
Resistance.
This is a book that will fascinate and delight Calvino fans and
anyone else interested in a remarkable portrait of a great writer
at work.
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