Six Memos for the Next Millennium - Softcover

Calvino, Italo

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0544146670 ISBN 13: 9780544146679

Publisher: Mariner Books, 2016

Synopsis

“One of the most rigorously presented and beautifully illustrated critical testaments in all of literature.”—Boston Globe

“A brilliant, original approach to literature, 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

At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued, and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are 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. Readers will be astonished by the prescience of these lectures, which have only gained in relevance as Calvino’s “next millennium” has dawned.

About this title

Review

Italo Calvino cast his lofty thoughts toward the pending millennium long before the rest of us. Now that the zeitgeist has caught up with him, it seems a good time to revisit his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, an investigation into the literary values that he wished to bequeath to future generations. Calvino, the author of Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and other postmodern fictional works, was to deliver these five "memos" (there was to be a sixth) as Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86, but he died before doing so. These lectures are dense, rigorous, and seemingly full of contradiction. The first is a paean to lightness (though "light like a bird," as Paul Valéry wrote, "and not like a feather"). Lightness is followed by quickness (without "presum[ing] to deny the pleasures of lingering"), exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. The perfect antidote to writerly laziness.

From the Author

ITALO CALVINO’s (1923-1985) superb storytelling gifts earned him international renown and a reputation as “one of the world’s best fabulists” (New York Times Book Review). At his death, at age sixty-one, he was the most-translated contemporary Italian writer. 

GEOFFREY BROCK is an award-winning translator and poet whose translations include works of Umberto Eco, Cesare Pavese, and others.

About this edition

• Publisher: Mariner Books
• Publication date: 2016
• ISBN 10: 0544146670
• ISBN 13: 9780544146679
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176