The Road to San Giovanni [Hardcover]

Italo Calvino (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 31, 1993

A major testament by an essential 20th century writer composed of five strikingly elegant "memory exercises" about his life and work--now available in paperback. With visionary passion, the author traces pieces of his childhood and adolescence, his experiences during WWII, and more. "Storytelling at its best."--Chicago Tribune.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

In five elegant "memory exercises" written between 1962 and 1977, Italian fiction writer Calvino (1923-85) presents an affecting self-portrait and offers indirect insights into how he conjured up his imaginary worlds. He writes of his difficult relationship with his father, a farmer and horticulturist whose passion for studying and acclimatizing exotic plants filled the future writer with an investigative spirit. Calvino ( The Baron in the Trees ) also recalls his adolescent movie mania, when watching the silver screen "satisfied a need . . . for the projection of my attention into a different space." His graphic account of fighting fascists during WW II becomes a meditation on the role played by imagination in human memory. One essay is an informal structuralist analysis of living in a house in a Parisian suburb. This sparkling translation concludes with Calvino's lyric, metaphorical, highly elliptical description of his creative process.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Kirkus Reviews

Precious little unpublished Calvino (1923-85) remains, and this is some: five slender pieces. The richest is a memoir of Calvino's father's semitragic hump up and down a steep hillside to reach the family's estates each day, down from which he took the vegetables and fruits he grew there. The Calvinos were involved, as a living, with Ligurian floriculture; to harvest one's own food, on the other hand, was for Calvino's father a declaration of faith in utility vs. decoration. To make the daily climb was also a Dantesque renunciation of the lower precincts of existence. Calvino recounts his father's climb, and his own youthful impatience with it, with a perfect modulation of regret, imagery, and sense. As good, or nearly, is a brilliant appreciation of Fellini--in which Calvino talks about the necessity of distance in movies (he's no great fan therefore of Italian neo-realism) and the moral perfection of Fellini's illustrated-comic-book style, in which ``he recuperates the monstrous into the human, into the indulgent complicity of the flesh.'' Pieces about taking out the garbage, a memory of a failed wartime Partisan engagement, and a set of variations upon metaphysical perspective are far weaker (and none of the quintet is especially well brought into English by Tim Parks; William Weaver's Calvino is missed). For the title piece and the one on Fellini, indispensable; the rest isn't memorable. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 150 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon Books; 1st edition (August 31, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0679415238
• ISBN-13: 978-0679415237
• Product Dimensions: 8.1 x 4.6 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,366,129 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars surprise, April 18, 2000

By 

courtney J angermeier - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Road to San Giovanni (Paperback)

Hmmm, reading the editorial reviews, I had to wonder if it might be time to go back and read this one again. As I consumate Calvino fan, I have to say I was completely dissapointed by the title essay the editors are raving about here; the one about Calvino's old-school agragarian father trying to spark cinema-going Calvino's interest in hauling veggies. The same story is told under the guise of fiction in Difficult Loves under the title of Lazy Sons, and, in my opinion, it was ten times better. I never thought I'd say it, but I was bored. Bored reading Calvino? Can you imagine? Neither could I. The other four essays were delightful and charming. (Personally I was rather fond of the one about the trash.) The writing/memory excercizes reminded me of work that Calvino's long-time friend George Perec put forth in Species of Spaces. They made me think, or rethink, or be intentional about thinking about, memory and space and existence. That's the sort of thing I want and expect from Calvino. Maybe I'm just sulking about that first essay, but I wanted something better, something more like the other essays there. Maybe, since this book was a compilation of Calvino's unpublished work that was printed posthumasly it was merely and editing mistake that allowed such disparate pieces to appear together. Maybe I would have liked that title essay better on it's own. I dunno. While I certainly wouldn't say don't read The Road to San Giovanni, I might caution Calvino fans to let go of some of their expectations before delving in.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Downhill, September 12, 2009

By 

KC (Chicago, IL United States) - See all my reviews

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This review is from: The Road to San Giovanni (Paperback)

This collections starts off with a bang--the title essay BLEW ME AWAY. It was beautiful. Unfortunately, subsequent essays shrivled in it's shadow. I crapped out before finishing the whole book, second to last essay I think, the one about garbage. If you buy this, do yourself a favor--read it backwards. Probably the way it should have been organized in the first place. If you don't buy this book, do yourself a favor--find the title essay somewhere else.

5.0 out of 5 stars Favorite Books, September 3, 2010

By 

Scrambler (Eastern USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Road to San Giovanni (Paperback)

The deprecated article on garbage is absolutely one of my favorites and a reason that I include this book on my short list of memorable books, even ahead of Invisible Cities or Six Memos for the Next Millennium! To each his own, I guess.