From one of modern literatures most captivating and elusive masters comes a posthumous volume of thoughtful, elegant, and quick-witted autobiographical writings, all previously unpublished in English. Here is Italo Calvino paying homage to his literary influences and tracing the evolution of his signature style. Here are his reminiscences of Italys antifascist resistance and the frenzy of politics and ideas of the postwar era.
The longest and most delightfully revealing section of the book is Calvinos diary of his travels in the United States in 1959 and 1960, which show him marveling at color TV, wrinkling his nose at the Beats, and reeling at the outpouring of racial hatred attending a civil rights demonstration in Alabama. Overflowing with insight and amusement, Hermit in Paris is an invaluable addition to the Calvino legacy.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From Publishers Weekly
This new volume of autobiographical writings (never before translated into English) by Calvino, whose short stories and novels gave him international acclaim as one of the 20th century's most important Italian fiction writers, is a welcome addition to his extensive works as well as to The Road to San Giovanni, a posthumous collection of autobiographical essays published more than a decade ago. This volume includes a series of articles and interviews that builds on the understanding of Calvino's life after World War II when he returned to Italy from the Communist resistance in the Alps, a period when Calvino felt a "moment of uncertainty" and a "perplexity about" his vocation as a writer before producing his first novel, The Cloven Viscount. The articles also feature Calvino's views on some of his most popular novels: "In the United States... the book of mine that became a hit was the one that you would have said was the furthest from American reading habits: Invisible Cities." But it is Calvino's lifelong fascination with America that makes this collection remarkable: more than half the book is given to an "American Diary 1959-1960," written during Calvino's two years traveling in the U.S., as he explores New York's thriving Greenwich Village and Actors Studio; a "violent, tough" Chicago; San Francisco's "squalid and filthy" beatnik scene; and Montgomery, Ala., where Calvino (who died in 1985) finds himself "in the middle" of "crucial days of struggle" of the Civil Rights movement. His diary reveals an obsession with what he later says most interests him as a writer: "daily life as the constant nourishment for writing."
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
Posthumous writings from Calvino.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.