Italo Calvino (1923--1985)

Last update: 23 Nov 2002 19:24
First version: Before 13 March 1995; fixed link-rot / found archived versions and added some text, 30 July 2026

---

I discovered Calvino aged around 9 or 10, going through my mother's science fiction and finding Cosmicomics. (Fortunately for me, she had it in English, rather than her native Italian.) I devoured it and re-read it often as a boy, not realizing that it was in any way avante garde high literature --- it was just SF, but mind-expanding, funny and fascinating. I didn't read any other Calvino until I was 20, when I tore through a lot in quick succession --- Invisible Cities, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, Castle of Crossed Destinies, Mr. Palomar all in one year. (I was supposed to be learning quantum field theory.) I recently (late 2025) went back to him, largely because my brother was reading If on a Winter's Night a Traveller. I am happy to report that far from being visited by the Suck Fairy, he remains delightful and uplifting (dated gender roles are dated). I now appreciate some of the literary games he was playing in a way I did not at 10, or even 20. (I am in awe of being able to write something which is both a tricky literary game and enjoyable by bright ten year old nerds.)

Recommended, by Calvino:
• The Castle of Crossed Destinies
• Cosmicomics
• If on a Winter's Night a Traveller [Review by my brother]
• Invisible Cities
• Mr. Palomar
• The Path to the Nest of Spiders
• Six Memos for the Next Millennium
• The Watcher and Other Stories
• "Cybernetics and Ghosts", from The Uses of Literature [1967. It's at once a lovely essay, an exposition of then-current structuralism, and an uncanny anticipation of what's going on today with Large Language Models. I should have read it before my 2026 talk; thanks to Henry Farrell for making me do so after the fact. PDF scan. Errata: p. 8, for "Weiner", read "Wiener"; p. 10, for "not translated", read "now translated"; p. 11, for "Kholmogorov", read "Kolmogorov".]

Recommended, about Calvino:
• Prof. Frank Pajares at Emory ran a good site dedicated to Calvino [Archived version]
• Bruce Sterling, Invisible Cities
• Gore Vidal [Both are in Vidal's essay collection United States; thanks to Peter Lindberg for the links]
  • "Calvino's Novels", New York Review of Books 30 May 1974 [Archived version]
  • "Calvino's Death", New York Review of Books 21 November 1985 [Archived version]

To read, by IC:
• Adam, one afternoon and other stories
• The Baron in the Trees
• The Cloven Viscount and the Nonexistant Knight
• Collection of Sand
• Difficult Loves
• Italian Folktales
• Marcovaldo, or, The Seasons in the City
• Numbers in the Dark
• The Road to San Giovanni
• Tau Zero
• Under the Jaguar Sun
• The Uses of Literature
• Why Read the Classics?

To read, about IC:
• Anna Botta, "Calvino and the Oulipo: An Italian Ghost in the Combinatory Machine?", MLN 112 (1997): 81--89 [The opening account of Italian critics uniformly damning everything he wrote after 1965 --- basically everything which makes him valuable to me! --- is fascinating]
• Warren Motte, "Italo Calvino and the Oulipo", Romance Notes 39 (1999): 185--193
• Warren F. Motte Jr. (ed. and trans.), Oulipo: A Primer of Potential Literature [Review by Danny Yee]

---

Previous versions: 11/23/2002 19:24:27