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At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on his Charles Eliot Norton poetry lectures to be delivered the following year at Harvard University. The six planned lectures would define the qualities he most valued in writing, and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Six Memos for the Next Millennium collects the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature, but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself.
He devotes one “memo” each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, drawing examples from his vast knowledge of myth, folklore, and works both ancient and modern. Written in the mid-1980s, these lectures have proven to be astonishingly prescient as we have entered Calvino’s “next millennium”.
“One of the most rigorously presented and beautifully illustrated critical testaments in all of literature.”—Boston Globe
“A key to Calvino’s own work and a thoroughly delightful and illuminating commentary on some of the world’s greatest writing.”—San Francisco Chronicle
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Creators
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Publisher
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Release date
June 11, 2020 -
Formats
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Kindle Book
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OverDrive Read
- ISBN: 9780544230965
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EPUB ebook
- ISBN: 9780544230965
- File size: 1293 KB
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Languages
- English
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Reviews
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May 2, 2016
When Calvino (If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler) died unexpectedly in 1985, he was an internationally known storyteller and arguably Italy’s most celebrated author. These five erudite essays, originally intended for the Charles Eliot Norton Poetry Lectures at Harvard, compose his final work. Calvino considers literary values that he sought in his own writing and ideas he wanted to convey to 21st-century writers. The essays explore, respectively, the themes of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. As Calvino’s chosen title for the collection indicates, he planned to write a final essay—on consistency—but never did. “Literature can survive only by pursuing outsized goals, even those beyond all hope of achievement,” Calvino declares. He asserts his fondness for concise short-form writing that concentrates the imagination. Praising literary design that features clear, sharp images and precisely chosen words, he warns that an image-
saturated world in the future could inhibit inner vision. Calvino’s lyrical essays move in so many directions, with such intellectual acuity, that they are often hard to keep up with. Brock contributes an able new translation, intended to correct errors in an earlier English-language version. -
August 30, 1993
This collection of five elegant essays by the Italian fiction writer offers an affecting self-portrait.
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