Six Memos For The Next Millennium: Amazon.ca: Italo Calvino: Books

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Italo Calvino cast his lofty thoughts toward the pending millennium long before the rest of us. Now that the zeitgeist has caught up with him, it seems a good time to revisit his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, an investigation into the literary values that he wished to bequeath to future generations. Calvino, the author of Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and other postmodern fictional works, was to deliver these five "memos" (there was to be a sixth) as Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86, but he died before doing so. These lectures are dense, rigorous, and seemingly full of contradiction. The first is a paean to lightness (though "light like a bird," as Paul Valéry wrote, "and not like a feather"). Lightness is followed by quickness (without "presum[ing] to deny the pleasures of lingering"), exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. The perfect antidote to writerly laziness. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

From Publishers Weekly

At the time of his death in 1985, Calvino was preparing to give the Norton Lectures at Harvard; this volume collects the texts completed at the time of his death, which are delightful, penetrating examinations of the literary experience.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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First Sentence
I will devote my first lecture to the opposition between lightness and weight, and will uphold the values of lightness. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover

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4.9 out of 5 stars (8 customer reviews)

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5.0 out of 5 stars A Guidebook for Artists of Every Discipline, Jun 16 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: Six Memos for the Next Millennium/the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-86 (Vintage International) (Paperback)

Calvino offers us a bag of jewels with these five essays on the principle qualities that will carry great writing into the next century. The lessons learned from "Lightness," "Quickness," "Exactitude," "Visibility," and "Multiplicity" can be applied in any creative situation. They add strength to my own compositional efforts, but even more, the multi-faceted richness of Calvino's prose and Creagh's translation is something to savor and rejoice in. Even in his essays, Calvino is a storyteller, and as always his characters are the moods and motives of the people at large, as well as simply people themselves. Whether this is your first or fiftieth time reading this little book, the rush of inspiration that will sweep over you is not to be stemmed. Buy it, read it, write in it, draw lines and circle your favorite words and sentences. This is a book to imprint into your mind.

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5.0 out of 5 stars il futurismo, Aug 17 2001

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Dane Larsen (Austin, TX USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Hardcover)

A new italian Futurist Manifesto, but this time a good one.

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5.0 out of 5 stars nurturing concepts for all creative genres, July 20 2000

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scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Six Memos for the Next Millennium/the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures 1985-86 (Vintage International) (Paperback)

It was a an Italian virtuoso contrabassist who told me to read these Lectures. Stefano plays all the arduously difficult new music literature for the contrabass. He travels with a violoncello,so he can play all that repertoire as well. When he plays this music he often ponders Calvino, five primary conceptual corridors toward what he thought of as literature,but music as well can be contemplated with these ideas. "Lightness", well music has a density, Mozart played games with it, and interpreting Mozart can be a treatise in the dialectic,the transformations and timbral modulations of lightness to heaviness.,ask any violinist.Calvino of course expounds on Kundera's popular book, on the weight of the lifeworld of living in the East,the coal-dusted passageways,or of a fallen love,begun transgressivly there as well. Dante is a frequent pilgrim(example) here the lightness of snow falling imperceptibly on the mountainside. "Quickness", but not how fast things move,(our Silicon Valley) odious airjets that may puncture the ozone layer,or violins, but the quickness of an image to transform our consciousness,to lighten it up from the cruel oppression of citylife.That's poetry. I think.Robert Musil is here as well, the complexity,the numbering imagination of his transitory work to modernity the opening two decades of this century,his "Man Without Qualities" a seemingly endless work.And Gedda's "Awfull Mess. . . " on the street a probing detective novel of complexity of a murder in Rome,on the way to the Labor Bureau of the Roman Government. In music I frequently think of Visibility when I have nothing to transport me into the bowels of a Bruckner or an Antheil Symphony,what do I see in the music,like the weight of this century in the "Largo" from the "Fifth Symphony" of Shostakovich.Multiplicity as well another Calvino chapter is here,sprouting its wings like a peacock, all around us if we only have the patience for it. To phanthom and explore all images of a work as looked at through a plexiglass. We seldom do that. How exact is art, "Exactitude" is what Leonardo di Vinci lived his life with, rewrote almost everything,Calvino tells us, as Leopardi,the Essays.

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5.0 out of 5 stars Five Stars for Six Memos
My interest in reading this collection of essays stems from a curiousity about narrative structure. I found that, while Calvino writes candid insertions about his own works, and... Read more

Published on Jun 29 2000 by Mark Valentine

5.0 out of 5 stars Masterful thought provoking and inspiring essays
This is truly one of the greatest books I have ever read. Inspires and helps generate new thoughts and ideas. Calvino was truly a master. Read more

Published on Oct 20 1999 by Lee