You are about to begin reading an article on Italo Calvino. Relax. Concentrate. You scroll down the Lexicon website, breathing in fragments of his life and works through the screen. You find it fascinating how a boy born in Cuba to botanist parents would follow the path he did; a communist militant, portraying the horrors he experienced in the Second World War, then a great Italian fabulist, before retreating into literature itself, deconstructing narrative and exploring the act of reading through postmodern works such as his most famous novel, If on a winter’s night a traveller. In fact, you find that this article begins in a remarkably similar way to that novel. How clever the author must think he is.
Calvino spent most of his childhood in an experimental floriculture station, where both his parents worked. Surrounded by scientists, the young Calvino felt compelled to hide his love for literature, feeling that it would be looked down upon by those around him – he would not go on to publish any writings until after the war had ended. To please his parents, Calvino studied agriculture at the University of Turin, but continued his love for literature, particularly though the reading of anti-Fascist writers such as Cesare Pavese. It was this that eventually inspired him to join a Communist resistance brigade – he had few communist sentiments, leaning himself towards anarchism, but felt that the Communists would be the most effective in putting an end to fascism.
After the war, Calvino finally began to the write. He balanced his political life as a member of the Italian Communist Party with his writing of fiction and essays, as well as writing for various communist publications. Drawing on his own experiences as a soldier, Calvino composed a novel, Il sentiero dei nidi di ragno, and several short stories in a neorealist style, portraying the horrors of war in uncompromising detail.
He found himself at a crossroads when it came to his second novel. The conflict lay between the novel he ought to write and the novel he would want to read. He felt obliged to write another realist work, baring the truth of his own experience in the war and creating a work of real political and social value. His 3 attempts at composing such a novel ended in failure, and eventually, inspired by the fantastical tales he had read as a child, wrote Il visconte dimezzato, the first of the i nostriantenati trilogy. Calvino’s new style was starkly different from the realist novels he attempted; surreal, whimsical takes on classical romance, Calvino’s novels from this period were rather fables than political treatises, and yet still carried the social weight Calvino desired through allegory.
After the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, Calvino became disillusioned with communism, leaving the Italian Communist Party, and began slowly to withdraw from politics altogether. In the late 1960s, associated with Oulipo, a collection of postmodernist and surrealist writers such as Barthes, Perec and Queneau, Calvino began to fall into the world of literature, his novels turning in on themselves and examining the nature of narrative itself. Calvino’s new postmodern tilt is best exemplified in If on a winter’s night a traveller. The novels follows you, the Reader, as you try to track down Italo Calvino’s new novel, and fall in love with the Other Reader in the process, the overarching narrative interspersed with extracts from novels you encounter on your journey. Alongside deconstructing the idea of what a story is, Calvino’s work serves as a love letter, both to his readers and the act of reading himself, creating a novel that is at once smugly self-aware and a moving ode to the author’s love of literature.
You consider the words you have just read. What a fascinating idea, turning a narrative upside down and using the story of the reader themself to frame a story, you think to yourself, and by God, what a witty article this is. Suddenly, your housemaster bursts into your room as you hurriedly close down the Lexicon website. He demands as to why you aren’t in bed yet, threatening to take away your iPad. You tell him that you’ll be just a moment, you’ve almost finished reading an article on Italo Calvino.
