Working my way through Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities, I've found that I've been hipped to an author who, much like Vonnegut, silently suggests that one must read all of his work at the soonest opportunity (and perhaps the shortest interval) possible. Here is a writer who clearly respects the role "atmosphere" takes in storytelling and one who can make vital characters of the simplest resources, i.e., inanimate objects. I can only imagine the care Calvino must have taken in building his prose, yet everything is so seamless, uncut.
As intrigued as I am by Calvino's book, I must remember that a few weeks back, I shelved Robert Kaplan's The Nothing That Is: A Natural History of Zero, a biography of a function and a mathematical nothing/something. Both the science dork and the pragmatist in me loved this book, truly a work of art that brings out the romantic edges of something otherwise mundane. As a follow-up, Charles Siefe's Zero is hanging out on the nightstand, atop Calvino's Cosmicomics.
Much of the early evening tonight was spent preparing dinner, with a new Broetzmann/McPhee disc at a formidable level. The music will be revisited before bed, after some mindless television intake, and prior to facing the reading choice that I predict will then naturally be made.
Posted by al on March 15, 2004 8:08 PMCalvino is indeed the shit. Two early favorites of mine are THE CLOVEN VISCOUNT and THE NON-EXISTENT KNIGHT available in a convenient two-fer from Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. Lighter fare not necessarily on par with INVISIBLE CITIES, but great fun just the same. BARON OF THE TREES floats my boat too. On a side note, HBJ also has beautiful editions of most of Stanislaw Lem’s works. Al, check him if you haven’t.
Posted by: derek at March 16, 2004 8:03 AMINVISIBLE CITIES in one of my touchstones. I return to it every 2 years or so to remind myself why "fiction" matters. That is, for inspiration. There is the beauty of the writing itself, to be sure, aided immesurably by a GRET translation from the pen of William Weaver. But the book also develops an ethic, and the whole thing is evidence of an understanding of form -- literary and otherwise; a whole treatise remains to be written on the mathematics of the thing -- that is as profound as it gets.
Be sure to check out William Gass' essay on this book. It's in his volume TESTS OF TIME (2002).
Posted by: Joe at March 22, 2004 7:10 AMMy personal favorite Calvino is the first one I read, "If On a Winter's Night a Traveler," still one my favorite books and my favorite example of well-done metafiction. Appropriately, I lent it out regularly for a period of years and, when I finally got my beat-up copy back and began to reread it, the text was very different than I remembered. Hmmmm . . .
Posted by: Jason at March 22, 2004 8:24 AM.................................................. © 2003 - 2006 bagatellen ..................................................