Writers in Profile: Italo Calvino

Italo Calvino is a writer who constantly reinvented himself, moving from gritty realism to whimsical folk tales to some of the best non-linear experimental fiction of the 20th Century. He was born in Cuba in 1923 and he was raised in Italy. In common with other young men of his generation, he was a soldier. He fought in the second world war on the side of the Italian resistance.

His early work was realistic and reflective of the political climate of the day, but he gradually began to drift away from realism. Calvino spent years collecting and translating hundreds of traditional Italian folk tales. It's perhaps because of this that a lot of his stories read like modern myths. He treated storytelling like a deck of cards or a game of chess. He was fascinated by the many ways in which  a few simple elements could be arranged and rearranged to create multiple meanings.

Here's a look at a few of his books:

The Baron in the Trees is considered by many to be Calvino's masterpiece. It's the story of a young nobleman who gets into an argument with his parents, climbs a tree, and vows never to touch the ground again. He stays in the tree for fifty years and remarkably, this does not lead to him becoming a hermit and rejecting society.

He hunts, falls in love, corresponds with various people including philosophers like Voltaire, he even fights pirates, all while leaping from branch to branch. This is Calvino's vision of the intellectual life, built on the idea that you have to keep a certain distance from the world in order to see it for what it is.

Invisible Cities features Marco Polo in conversation with Kublai Khan where the great traveler describes  fifty-five fantastical cities to the emperor, each with its own unique features and its own ways of living and being...but they are all imaginative variations of one city: Venice. This book is less a novel and more a meditation, about community and the ways in which people live and operate as a collective.

If on a Winter's Night a Traveler is a meta novel about readers and reading. It's written in the second person addressing you, the reader. It begins with a chapter that describes you (the reader) going to a bookstore to buy the new Italo Calvino novel. You get home, settle into your favourite chair, and start reading. However, just as you get hooked on the plot, the text cuts off due to a printing error. You return to the bookstore to complain, where you meet Ludmilla, the other reader, and together you embark on a quest to find the real ending.

The book alternates between two types of chapters. The you chapters follow your adventures as you chase down the missing manuscript. Then there are the incidental chapters. Every time you think you’ve found the "real" book, you actually find a first chapter of a different novel in a completely different genre. In total, there are ten different opening chapters of ten fictional books, none of which are finished.

It’s a dizzying, funny, and deeply romantic book, both about the romance between the reader and Ludmilla, and the romance between a person and the printed page. Reading this book is a one-of-a-kind experience. This book is essentially a  celebration of how important you are to the process of making a story come alive.

The Complete Cosmicomics is a collection of myths about the birth of the universe. It is arguably Calvino’s most imaginative work. The premise is brilliantly simple: each story begins with a cold, scientific fact (about the Big Bang, the moon, or cellular mitosis), and then Calvino writes a whimsical story about what it was like to be there.

Almost all the stories are told by an ageless, shapeless entity named Qfwfq,  who has existed since the beginning of time. He’s been a single-celled organism, a dinosaur, a being made of pure light, and a man living in a modern city. He talks about the Big Bang or the cooling of the Earth’s crust as if he’s gossiping about old neighbours.

This book brings together several decades of these stories. They are short, and self contained, they are funny and warm, and they read like folk tales you’d hear around a campfire. It just happens that this campfire is located in the middle of a newly forming galaxy.