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.
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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Precious little unpublished Calvino (1923-85) remains, and this is some: five slender pieces.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.
This text refers to an alternate
Hardcover
edition.
