Product Description

Italo Calvino, one of the world's best storytellers, died on the eve of his departure for Harvard, where he was to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86. Reticent by nature, he was always reluctant to talk about himself, but he welcomed the opportunity to talk about the making of literature. In the process of devising his lectures--his wife recalls that they were an "obsession" for the last year of his life--he could not avoid mention of his own work, his methods, intentions, and hopes. This book, then, is Calvino's legacy to us: those universal values he pinpoints for future generations to cherish become the watchword for our appreciation of Calvino himself.

What about writing should be cherished? Calvino, in a wonderfully simple scheme, devotes one lecture (a memo for his reader) to each of five indispensable literary values. First there is "lightness" (leggerezza), and Calvino cites Lucretius, Ovid, Boccaccio, Cavalcanti, Leopardi, and Kundera--among others, as always--to show what he means: the gravity of existence has to be borne lightly if it is to be borne at all. There must be "quickness," a deftness in combining action (Mercury) with contemplation (Saturn). Next is "exactitude," precision and clarity of language. The fourth lecture is on "visibility," the visual imagination as an instrument for knowing the world and oneself. Then there is a tour de force on "multiplicity," where Calvino brilliantly describes the eccentrics of literature (Elaubert, Gadda, Musil, Perec, himself) and their attempt to convey the painful but exhilarating infinitude of possibilities open to humankind.

The sixth and final lecture - worked out but unwritten - was to be called "Consistency." Perhaps surprised at first, we are left to ponder how Calvino would have made that statement, and, as always with him, the pondering leads to more. With this book Calvino gives us the most eloquent, least defensive "defense of literature" scripted in our century - a fitting gift for the next millennium.

Esther Calvino has supervised the preparation of this book. She is Italo Calvino's Argentinian-born wife and a translator for several international organizations. Among Calvino's best-known works of fiction are Invisible Cities, Cosmicomics, The Baron in the Trees, if on a winter's night a traveler, and Mr. Palomar.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #166293 in Books
• Published on: 1988-01-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 136 pages

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.

Customer Reviews

A Guidebook for Artists of Every Discipline
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.

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

nurturing concepts for all creative genres
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.