Product Description

Six Memos for the Next Millenium is a collection of five lectures Italo Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death. Here is his legacy to us: the universal values he pinpoints become the watch-words for out appreciation of Calvino himself.

What should be cherished in literature? Calvino devotes one lecture, or memo to the reader, toe each of five indispensable qualities: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity.  A sixth lecture, on consistency, was never committed to paper, and we are left only to ponder the possibilities.  With this book, he gives us the most eloquent defense to literature written in our century--a fitting gift for the next millennium.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #189031 in Books
• Published on: 1995-12-04
• Released on: 1995-12-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback

From Amazon.com
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.

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.

From Library Journal
Calvino died just before he was to deliver these lectures. They focus on "things that only literature can give us," on "certain qualities, or peculiarities of literature that are very close to my heart": lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity. (The final lecture, on consistency, has not been found.) Calvino ranges widely in classical and modern European literature to illustrate his themes, but his reflections are perhaps most revealing as commentaries on his own work, where the search for lightness is "a reaction to the weight of living," fantasy occupies a central place, and multiple possibilities are worked out in specific detail. Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.