[HN Gopher] The Worlds of Italo Calvino
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The Worlds of Italo Calvino
Author : Caiero
Score : 71 points
Date : 2023-03-16 05:24 UTC (17 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.newyorker.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.newyorker.com)
| tines wrote:
| Non-paywalled link?
| joe5150 wrote:
| https://12ft.io/proxy?q=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.newyorker.com%2Fma...
| ErikCorry wrote:
| This made me want to re-read "If on a Winter's Night a
| Traveller".
| voz_ wrote:
| I adore Italo Calvino. Even his less popular works, like The
| Baron In The Trees, move me. Invisibile Cities, If on a winter's
| night a traveler, are even better. That being said, I almost feel
| like this author is taking him too seriously. Like Kurt Vonnegut,
| Joseph Heller, and many other authors, I think Calvino is
| mostly... having a laugh? If that makes sense. The overwhelming
| feeling across all the works is absurdity. For example, take the
| author's view of Invisible Cities.
|
| > What explains the mutability of Marco Polo's cities? A quarter
| of the way through the tales we learn that Marco Polo has no
| knowledge of Asian languages.
|
| That's not it, I think. It's the fact that Marco Polo is
| bullshitting, and Kublai Khan knows it, and does not care. The
| whole point is that this guy is a borderline fraud, weaving tall
| tales, but no one cares because the stories are good. Its a
| comedic absurdist view, a mirror held up to fiction, basically
| asking, "who cares?"
| WaxProlix wrote:
| I felt more Borges (inward turning, selfseriousness) than
| Vonnegut (having a laugh?) from Invisible Cities. But I agree,
| the author here seems to take it a step further. A good
| reminder to check out some of his other stuff - thanks :)
| riffraff wrote:
| I'm inclined to agree. Invisible Cities is introspective and
| reflective.
|
| Perhaps "Cosmicomics" is a better example of the author
| having a laugh.
|
| I loved both tho.
| kgwgk wrote:
| Cosmicomics is great!
| dmux wrote:
| >It's the fact that Marco Polo is bullshitting, and Kublai Khan
| knows it, and does not care. The whole point is that this guy
| is a borderline fraud, weaving tall tales, but no one cares
| because the stories are good. Its a comedic absurdist view, a
| mirror held up to fiction, basically asking, "who cares?"
|
| I never quite thought Marco Polo was bullshitting, per se, but
| rather revealing aspects of a city (perhaps even the same exact
| city, or all cities, for that matter) that are otherwise left
| unexamined.
| MontyCarloHall wrote:
| Each city is an allegory for a different literary trope or
| storytelling technique. The fact that they all blend together
| is a commentary on how story elements get recycled.
| dmux wrote:
| I'll have to read up on literary tropes as I'm having a
| hard time picking out which ones are being explored in some
| of the stories. For example, the city of "Armilla" is
| described as being nothing but a series of pipes topped
| with sinks, toilets, bathtubs, etc. To me, Marco Pollo (and
| Calvino) are forcing the reader to think of a mostly
| invisible system that is a _huge_ component of any city:
| plumbing.
| rcarr wrote:
| There is a fairly strong argument to be made that the
| entire book is just a love letter to Venice. From the
| wikipedia:
|
| In one key exchange in the middle of the book, Kublai
| prods Polo to tell him of the one city he has never
| mentioned directly--his hometown. Polo's response: "Every
| time I describe a city I am saying something about
| Venice."
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Cities
| timeon wrote:
| This reminds me that there is reference to "Armilla" also
| in Kundera's "Unbearable Lightness of Being": _Even
| though the sewer pipelines reach far into our houses with
| their tentacles, they are carefully hidden from view, and
| we are happily ignorant of the invisible Venice of shit
| underlying our bathrooms, bedrooms, dance halls, and
| parliaments._
| yamtaddle wrote:
| I get why you'd include him in the "having a laugh" group, but
| I don't really get that from Vonnegut, overall. The most-
| uplifting I usually find him is on par with Camus' "Myth of
| Sisyphus", so a kind of dark, existentialist sort of uplifting.
| Even most of his "jokes" are a pretty big downer when you think
| about it, and much of the time he's not telling jokes at all (
| _Mother Night_ or _Deadeye Dick_ or _Galapagos_ or _Bluebeard_
| have humorous and absurd parts, but I 'd not characterize the
| overall effect as funny or absurd, at all--the humor's so you
| come away with "well, that's life" and not "Jesus, I guess I
| should go kill myself")
| voz_ wrote:
| Yes, I could see that, but then you read Hocus Pocus, Pearls
| Before Swine, Cat's Cradle, and realize that, maybe, those
| serious books... are still humorous but in their own why? I
| do concede the point that some of Vonnegut's work is darker,
| and the humor is harder to find (perhaps akin to Catch-22s
| Snowden chapters, rather than say, Orr or The Anabaptists
| Chaplain's Wife). I think I probably got a strong feeling of
| this as the last Vonnegut I read was "Armageddon in
| Retrospect" which was almost a Sedaris like read. Or maybe I
| am misremembering. Either way, yea, Vonnegut is perhaps a
| stretch there :)
| dmux wrote:
| >the humor's so you come away with "well, that's life" and
| not "Jesus, I guess I should go kill myself"
|
| Exactly. "So it goes."
| DubiousPusher wrote:
| Yeah, I think it's very clear that Calvino is having a blast
| sending his reader on a ludicrous "fetch quest" type conspiracy
| of misunderstanding in, "If on a Winter's Night a Traveller..."
| piffey wrote:
| Italo Calvino was a part of Oulipo
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oulipo), a group of French and
| Italian writers and mathematicians who would purposefully
| invent constrained writing techniques for fun. One was that you
| could only use the language from McDonald's ads to tell a
| story. Another was an entire 300 page novel written without the
| letter e. They very much were having a laugh and enjoying the
| playfulness of language as a group.
| beepbooptheory wrote:
| Not sure if this is spurious, but I remember reading somewhere
| that James Joyce was heard just cackling in his room for most
| of the time he wrote Finnegan's Wake.
| world2vec wrote:
| Every few years I come back to " The Baron In The Trees" and
| "Palomar", my favorite books from Calvino. Highly recommend, he
| has a certain way with words. Doesn't take himself seriously but
| still ponders deeply about things we all can relate.
| piffey wrote:
| I adore that book. I finally got to read it in Italian this
| year and was so happy to find that the English translation I'd
| initially read so well conveyed Calvino's playfulness in that
| book.
| kelseyfrog wrote:
| Invisible Cities lays immobile on my bookshelf. After reading
| 3/4s of it, I had to stop. Not because it's bad, but the
| opposite.
|
| I can't bare the thought that I'll never be able to read it again
| for the first time and the thought paralyzes me. My mind, in
| denial, begs me to conclude, "If I never finish it, it will never
| end."
| dmux wrote:
| I'm not sure if you're just waxing poetic or actually can't
| bring yourself to finish, but I'd highly recommend you do. As
| Calvino points out in "Why Read the Classics?" [0]
|
| >Hence, whether we use the verb "read" or the verb "reread" is
| of little importance. Indeed, we may say:
|
| >Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery
| as the first reading.
|
| > Every reading of a classic is in fact a rereading. Definition
| 4 may be considered a corollary of this next one:
|
| > A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it
| has to say.
|
| [0] https://archive.is/aQdHv
| telotortium wrote:
| Just come back to it after 15 years like me :)
| mariusor wrote:
| I always wonder when reading essays like this, why do authors
| start them off with little stories meant to put down their
| readers. Why would you spin me the yarn of being this uncultured,
| self-absorbed modern man that can't be bothered to browse a
| bookshop's shelves unless some arcane signal penetrates all the
| way down through their dulled intellect. Even if I'd be that
| person, reminding me of it will make me go read through the rest
| in an adversarial way at best, or I'll make me stop reading it
| all together.
| dmux wrote:
| The first couple of paragraphs of the article are a nod to the
| opening of Calvino's "If on a winter's night a traveler."
| superposeur wrote:
| Ever since I first read it in college, I've cited Invisible
| Cities as my favorite fiction book. As highly rated as it is, I
| still think its philosophical depth is underrated.
|
| In particular, I think it holds wisdom for how to live in this
| age. Everyone says, to the point of cliche, that institutions and
| information can't be trusted; all is uncertain; all is illusion;
| distrust sources. But this is no answer, in itself, for how to
| live. Instead, I often think of the last paragraph of Invisible
| Cities:
|
| "The inferno of the living is not something that will be; if
| there is one, it is what is already here, the inferno where we
| live every day, that we form by being together. There are two
| ways to escape suffering it. The first is easy for many: accept
| the inferno and become such a part of it that you can no longer
| see it. The second is risky and demands constant vigilance and
| apprehension: seek and learn to recognize who and what, in the
| midst of inferno, are not inferno, then make them endure, give
| them space."
| solarist wrote:
| You are not alone :-) I live by this very paragraph, as well as
| the last paragraph of Solaris by Lem:
|
| "I had no hope. Yet expectation lived on in me, the last thing
| she had left behind. What further consummations, mockeries,
| torments did I still anticipate? I had no idea as I abided in
| the unshaken belief that the time of cruel wonders was not yet
| over."
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