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Product Details
Hardcover: 640 pages
Publisher: Princeton University Press (June 17, 2013)
This book is a beautifully produced collection which includes a third of the items that appeared in Luca Baranelli's Lettere in 2000. Calvino's correspondence in this volume focuses on the literary and political rather than family and personal matters, and more on international than on narrowly Italian issues.
During his life, Calvino avoided both interviews and discussions of his work. In a letter dated September 1954, he suggests that "autobiography is something that one writes by doing a kind of violence to oneself." The author asks that his writing stand on its own: "A text must be something that can be read and evaluated without reference to the existence or otherwise of a person whose name and surname appear on the cover."
Calvino's letters do not display a writer practicing for his fiction or essays, nor do they give evidence of a man with an eye on posterity. Instead the reader observes a man living in the present. Michael Wood, who selected and introduces the correspondence, says that it gives "the sense of direct communication, of a man being as clear as he can about a host of matters." In his letters, Calvino, "tells rather than shows his correspondents what he means - with great and often moving success," observes Wood.
There is, however, plenty here for readers who have followed this giant of post war Italian literature. Calvino talks of his preference for the creation of short stories, "rounded and perfect like so many eggs, stories that if you add or remove a single word the whole thing goes to pieces." The author gives us a hint of the curious creative process for Mr.Read more ›
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The bizarre thing about reading other people's letters, is you get to thinking that they're writing letters to you... Then you start developing some kind of strange celebrity obsession with those people, maybe more like an infatuation, or maybe like True Love. Not saying that happened to me or anything! But with Italo Calvino: Letters 1941-1985, it's hard not to fall in love (or fall in respect, whatever) with this magnificent writer, Italy's premier postmodern author, and one of my personal favorites.
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The letters themselves are fascinating of anyone who has read a great deal of modern Italian literature. If you have not, you will miss the important assessment of Fenoglio, and much else of importance. Remarkable translation, and a good selection, less expensive than the Mondadori complete letters. If you haven't read the Italian originals, you will not appreciate the quality of the translation.
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