ID Scheda #11790
- Sezione
- Critica
- Tipo di risorsa
- articolo su quotidiano
- Autore
- Dirda, Michael
- Titolo
- Book World: Calvino's Mental Calisthenics
- Titolo del periodico
- The Washington Post
- Specifiche del periodico
- B02
- Luogo di pubblicazione
- Washington
- Data di pubblicazione
- 13 dicembre 1993
- Note
- Which is exceptionally easy to do. The best-known Italian writer of his generation, [Italo Calvino], who died at 62 in 1985, possessed a remarkably agile and playful imagination. In "Cosmicomics," for instance, he dared to depict the Keystone capers of Qfwfq and other anomalous entities during the early years of the cosmos. For "The Castle of Crossed Destinies" he challenged himself to create stories out of random sequences of tarot cards. "Invisible Cities" evoked, in prose close to poetry, the dreamlike cities that Marco Polo visited on his journeys for the Great Khan. For me, though, his richest book remains "If on a winter's night a traveler." In that novel you, the Reader, are the main character, invited to relax and enjoy the latest Calvino novel, only to discover that you have somehow acquired a defective copy. As the book progresses, Calvino contrives to present and link the first chapters (and only the first chapters) from a dozen different novels - a mystery, a nouveau roman, an erotic entertainment. The result is a book that belongs on a shelf near Nabokov's "Pale Fire," Felipe Alfau's "Locos" and Gilbert Sorrentino's "Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things."
- Lingua
- inglese
- Paese di pubblicazione
- Stati Uniti