Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941–1985

by Italo Calvino, Michael Wood (Contributor), Martin McLaughlin (Translator)

The first collection of letters in English by one of the great writers of the twentieth centuryThis is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy's most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide fame with such books as Cosmicomics, Invisible Cities, and If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler. But he was also an influential literary critic, an important literary editor, and a masterful letter writer whose correspondents included Umberto Eco, Primo Levi, Gore Vidal, Leonardo Sciascia, Natalia Ginzburg, Michelangelo Antonioni, Pier Paolo Pasolini, and Luciano Berio. This book includes a generous selection of about 650 letters, written between World War II and the end of Calvino’s life. Selected and introduced by Michael Wood, the letters are expertly rendered into English and annotated by well-known Calvino translator Martin McLaughlin.The letters are filled with insights about Calvino’s writing and that of others; about Italian, American, English, and French literature; about literary criticism and literature in general; and about culture and politics. The book also provides a kind of autobiography, documenting Calvino’s Communism and his resignation from the party in 1957, his eye-opening trip to the United States in 1959-60, his move to Paris (where he lived from 1967 to 1980), and his trip to his birthplace in Cuba (where he met Che Guevara). Some lengthy letters amount almost to critical essays, while one is an appropriately brief defense of brevity, and there is an even shorter, reassuring note to his parents written on a scrap of paper while he and his brother were in hiding during the antifascist Resistance.This is a book that will fascinate and delight Calvino fans and anyone else interested in a remarkable portrait of a great writer at work.

Genres: Nonfiction, Italy, Biography, Literature, Italian Literature, Essays

636 pages, Kindle Edition

Published November 1, 2024

About the author

Italo Calvino was born in Cuba and grew up in Italy. He was a journalist and writer of short stories and novels. His best known works include the Our Ancestors trilogy (1952-1959), the Cosmicomics collection of short stories (1965), and the novels Invisible Cities (1972) and If On a Winter's Night a Traveler (1979).

His style is not easy to classify; much of his writing has an air reminiscent to that of fantastical fairy tales (Our Ancestors, Cosmicomics), although sometimes his writing is more "realistic" and in the scenic mode of observation (Difficult Loves, for example). Some of his writing has been called postmodern, reflecting on literature and the act of reading, while some has been labeled magical realist, others fables, others simply "modern". He wrote: "My working method has more often than not involved the subtraction of weight. I have tried to remove weight, sometimes from people, sometimes from heavenly bodies, sometimes from cities; above all I have tried to remove weight from the structure of stories and from language."

Reviews

[Argos · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mektuplar edebiyatta farklı bir tür, pek sık rastlamayız onlara, ancak çok eğitici ve öğretici olduklarını düşünüyorum. Bu kitapta olduğu gibi bir kişi tarafından (I. Calvino) başkalarına gönderilmiş kimi resmi havada, kimi çok samimi mektuplar olabileceği gibi, iki kişi arasında yazılmış biraz da özel hayata dair olan (L. Erbil-A. Arif veya N.Hikmet-Piraye) mektuplar da olabilir. Hangi tür olursa olsun edebi yönleri yadsınamaz.

Seçme Mektuplar 1945-1985 yılları arasında Calvino’nun yazdığı mektupları içeriyor. İlk yıllarda oldukça sık olan mektuplar son yıllarda seyrekleşiyor. Peki kimlere mi yazılmış bunlar? Çoğunluğu edebi tartışmalar içerdiğinden yazarlara, eleştirmenlere, gazete ve dergi editörlerine. Çocukluk arkadaşları, parti arkadaşları ve yabancı ülkedeki dostlara da yazılmış.

Mektuplar yazanın kişiliğini istese de istemese de ele verir. Bu mektupları okuyunca Calvino’nun egosunun bir hayli kabarık olduğunu, eleştiriye tahammülünün az olduğunu hemen farkediyorsunuz. Buna karşın dostluğu bir kez sağladı mı ondan ömür boyu vazgeçmediğini ve her zaman yanında olduğunu da görüyorsunuz. Örneğin Pavese. Edebi tarzları çok farklı, siyasi görüşleri ters düşmese de çok da benzer değil, ama ölümüne bir C. Pavese dostu.

Bazı kitaplarının yazım süreçlerini de mektuplardan öğrenebiliyorsunuz (Görünmez Kentler gibi). Mektuplarında ısrarla açıklamak zorunda hissettiği konu İtalyan Komunist Partisi’nden 1957 yılında istifa etmesi. Bu konuda adeta kendini savunmak zorunda hissediyor. Stalin’in politikasından duyduğu rahatsızlığının, onun ölümünden sonra da “Stalinsizleşme” politikası olarak etkisiz kaldığını görünce partiden istifa ettiğini, komunistlikten vazgeçmediğini bıkmadan usanmadan yazmış.

Calvino’nun türkçe kitaplarının neredeyse tamamını okudum, bu mektuplar da cilası oldu diyorum. Okumak şart değilse de Calvino dostları kapağını bir açsın derim.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

A lot of these letters deal either with the internal politics of the communist party, or lengthy discussions of literary theory, neither of which I found particularly interesting sadly...

[James Murphy · Rating 2 out of 5]

Italo Calvino worked in publishing, and most of this collection is concerned with Italian fiction by writers I'm unfamiliar with, and with Italian publishing. It's outside my experience, so obscure I had trouble relating to it. Except for a handful of letters--to Gore Vidal, for instance, or to Elsa Morante--they are to contacts unknown to me. I'd hoped they'd be filled with insight into his own work. A few are, responding to a fan's comments or inquiry into his methods or intentions. For the most part, however, these letters are to Italian friends or are about the Italian publishing business.

[Jillian · Rating 5 out of 5]

The bizarre thing about reading other people’s letters, is you get to thinking that they’re writing letters to you… Then you start developing some kind of strange celebrity obsession with those people, maybe more like an infatuation, or maybe like True Love. Not saying that happened to me or anything! But with Italo Calvino: Letters 1941-1985, it’s hard not to fall in love (or fall in respect, whatever) with this magnificent writer, Italy’s premier postmodern author, and one of my personal favorites.

Read the full review here: http://litbeetle.com/2013/08/29/on-it...

[Goke Pelemo · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nice peek into Calvino’s thinking. After reading this, I feel ready to read his actual books. It is a collection of letters where he reviews his own thoughts and motivations in the books he has written, as well as those of others who he was writing letters to.

Most notable for me was that although he is well versed in history, he is more of a psychological than historical writer, and this might differ from work to work. He is aware of historical themes, but instead focuses on psychological themes; how he wants the reader to think after reading, rather than painting a picture that the reader gets lost in. In other words, his aim is to change your mind or reinforce his own way of thinking if you’re already aligned with his world view.

Lots of political and theological themes, which was indicative of the times. He is also a systems thinker, so this should be read with an open mind since he skewed towards communism. Process his assertions with care.

[Terence Hall · Rating 5 out of 5]

The letters themselves are fascinating of anyone who has read a great deal of modern Italian literature. If you have not, you will miss the important assessment of Fenoglio, and much else of importance. Remarkable translation, and a good selection, less expensive than the Mondadori complete letters. If you haven't read the Italian originals, you will not appreciate the quality of the translation.

[David Allison · Rating 4 out of 5]

A useful guide to the arguments and politics that informed the bold, clear lines of Calvino's prose. If I'm honest, though, I'm mostly just envious of how blunt Calvino is with his contemporaries.

[Mark · Rating 5 out of 5]

Italo Calvino's letters are great fun to read. He had something to say about all the literary stars of the day, and his sometimes ascerbic comments are always illuminating. He discusses his own works, often in much detail but, at least in this selection of letters, just a few of his works (Invisible Knight, Cloven Viscount, and his stories) get most of the attention. I was very disappointed that my personal favorite, Mr. Palomar, only appeared in one or two letters.

Because I am so fond of his collection, Italian Folktales, I appreciated the great number of letters in which he talks about sources. He discusses at length the challenges he faces in assembling the collection:

"There is the problem of the collection of the material which for some regions has already been published and for others is almost non-existent. There is the question of the dialects. There is the problem when assembling material from different collectors of giving a stylistic unity, and unity of method to the book. Some time ago one of our colleagues sent us a proposal from Prof. Vidossi for a volume containing the Tuscan, Umbrian, and Veneto tales in the original and the ones from the other regions in Italian translation. But Einaudi’s intention is to do something that is as far removed as possible from a university text-book, but which is instead fresh reading for a non-academic public, though carried out with all the criteria of Italian folklore research. Consequently, Einaudi’s view is that the publishing house should take responsibility itself for the editing of the work, making use of the advice and material offered by specialists, and should “unify” the volume. In a word, keeping a sound philological basis but adopting criteria that are essentially artistic. In fact he actually proposed that I—poor me!—should take on this work of unification, in other words choosing from amongst the variant versions, translating where things need to be translated, rewriting in Italian things that have already been written down."

Poor me, indeed! I had never really thought about what went into the assembly of that collection. One has to wonder, will Italian Folktales be his great legacy? Will people still read his novels a century from now, or will they be dismissed as mid-twentieth century fantastic literature, derivative of greater writers like Borges? Only time will tell.

In the meantime though, these letters are very enjoyable to read: the products of a highly creative and humane intellect.

[Vincent Hernot · Rating 4 out of 5]

Now these are letters you want to read. I've always liked Calvino, and now I like him even more.
Growing up, Calvino was one of those very few serious, respected writers who seemed able to reach out beyond their expected readership: he was a bridge with science-fiction, with the fantastic genre, and so he led me to Borges and many others.
Here, we hear Calvino the writer but also the reader, the theorist, the thinker, and the lover of books (he writes of finally realising one of his dreams: reading twelve hours a day...)
So these letters are not hastily written postcards about the weather, nor are they very personal (that, in fact, links up with my only criticism: the book needed an introduction - even a short one - on Calvino himself to contextualise a bit).
No, those letters are mostly serious reading matter, first drafted and then written up. Several are a few pages long, many are dense with ideas, theories and references. All display intelligence, vivacity, an open mind eager to discover new voices, new ideas, to experiment, to know.
The notes are abundant, and most often very much needed if you've only got a sketchy idea of the Italian literary landscape: some names I knew (Morante, Sciascia, Pasolini, Gadda etc), most I'd never heard of. But it's not who he says something to that matters (except for that beautiful gem of a note to Elsa Morante), it's what he says, and what he's trying to say.
As a Frenchman I would have liked to read more on the Oulipo and his friendship with Queneau and the others, but ok, that's just me.
Great letters in all, which also make it very clear I'll have to re-read Calvino: his texts were obviously playing on many levels, both narratively and conceptually, and I don't think my 16/18 year-old self was quite able to see through all that...Will my current self be able to?!

[Lyman Maddox · Rating 4 out of 5]

My son and I share a love of Calvino's books, and on a visit to the Seminary Co-op in Chicago he bought me this collection of letters. Reading this book is like sitting down with a big box of letters, except there's no dust and if a dog knocks it off the table, things don't get mixed up.
In this book, you're the detective.
My impression is that Calvino spent as much time reading, editing, and publicizing other people's books as he did writing his own. He combines openness to new writing with practical habits and skills in the day-to-day publishing business. He's generous with his time and praise, and enthusiastic about writing. And he corresponded with lots of interesting people.
If you want to go beyond biography to explore a practical intellectual's life, I strongly recommend this book.

[Karen]

The 13 Best Biographies, Memoirs, and History Books of 2013

Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985 (public library) offers more than four decades of wisdom in 600+ pages of personal correspondence by one of the 20th century’s most enchanting writers and most beautiful minds. In one letter, written on July 27, 1949, Calvino contributes one of his many insights on writing:

To write well about the elegant world you have to know it and experience it to the depths of your being just as Proust, Radiguet and Fitzgerald did: what matters is not whether you love it or hate it, but only to be quite clear about your position regarding it.

[Blair Hodges · Rating 3 out of 5]

As the volume's introduction suggests, Calvino's letters are markedly different from his fiction and essay writing. They are very straightforward, telling rather than showing. A solid background in revolutionary movements of the 40s-60s will facilitate a better reading of this book than I was able to muster, but I especially enjoyed 15 or 16 of the more theoretical engagements regarding literature found here.

[Dave Pratt · Rating 2 out of 5]

I stopped reading this book and passed it on to my sister , I found it uninteresting as it is not the sort of book that I read.

[Mills College Library]

856.914 C168 2013