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Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979).His style is not easily classified; much of his writing has an air of the fantastic reminiscent of fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."

Quotes

Дмитрий Веснинhas quotedlast year
Perhaps only this echo of material interest can counterbalance the instinctive gesture of contemporary man: that of throwing things away.

[1980]
Дмитрий Веснинhas quotedlast year
‘The discovery of popular culture,’ writes Peter Burke,

took place in the main in what might be called the cultural periphery of Europe as a whole and of different countries within it. Italy, France and England had long had national literatures and a literary language. Their intellectuals were becoming cut off from folksongs and folktales in a way that Russians, say, or Swedes were not . . . It is not surprising to find that in Britain it was the Scots rather than the English who rediscovered popular culture, or that the folksong movement came late to France and was pioneered by a Breton, Villemarqué, whose collection, Barzaz Braiz, was published in 1839. Again, Villemarqué’s equivalent in Italy, Tommaseo, came from Dalmatia, and when Italian folklore was first studied seriously, in the later nineteenth century, the most important contributions were made in Sicily . . . In Germany too the initiative came from the periphery; Herder and Von Arnim were born east of the Elbe. (pp. 13–14)
mila_ gihas quoted4 months ago
the rest of you can’t remember, but I can. We had her on top of us all the time, that enormous Moon: when she was full—nights as bright as day, but with a butter-coloured light—it looked as if she were going to crush us; when she was new, she rolled around the sky like a black umbrella blown by the wind;

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    The Complete Cosmicomics
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