Why Read the Classics? - Hardcover

Calvino, Italo

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679415246 ISBN 13: 9780679415244

Publisher: Pantheon, 1999

Synopsis

Italo Calvino was not only a prolific master of fiction, he was also an uncanny reader of literature, a keen critic of astonishing range. Why Read the Classics? is the most comprehensive collection of Calvino's literary criticism available in English, accounting for the enduring importance to our lives of crucial writers of the Western canon. Here--spanning more than two millennia, from antiquity to postmodernism--are thirty-six immediately relevant, elegantly written, accessible ruminations on the writers, poets, and scientists who meant most to Calvino at different stages of his life.

Following the title essay, which explores fourteen definitions of "the classic," Calvino offers writings that are at once critical appraisals and personal appreciations of, among others: Homer, Xenophon, Ovid, Pliny, Nezami, Ariosto, Cardano, Galileo, Defoe, Voltaire, Diderot, Ortes, Stendhal, Balzac, Dickens, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Twain, Henry James, Stevenson, Conrad, Pasternak, Gadda, Montale, Hemingway, Ponge, Borges, and Queneau.

At a time when the Western canon and the very notion of "literary greatness" have come under increasing disparagement by the vanguard of so-called multiculturalism, Why Read the Classics? gives us an inspiriting corrective.

About this title

Review:

Why read Italo Calvino's book on the classics? Because it passes his own test for what a classic is, and its brisk prose can blast your concept of the word clean of the dusty associations that cling to it. Calvino gives 14 offbeat definitions of classic, my favorite being "a work which constantly generates a pulviscular cloud of critical discourse around it, but which always shakes the particles off." His sharp essays on Conrad, Dickens, Diderot, Flaubert, Ovid, and others constitute an act of self-criticism too, a novelist's imaginative autobiography. In 1955, when rave-reviewing Robinson Crusoe, he called Daniel Defoe the "inventor of modern journalism." In 1954, he overcame his disgust with Hemingway's life "of violent tourism," coolly assessed his dry heights and sodden depths, and called himself Papa's apprentice. And the 1984 piece on Borges shows who influenced Calvino most once he'd become a master himself.

From both the American and the Argentinian, Calvino learned to be concise, and his quick sketches of books like the "unqualified masterpiece" Our Mutual Friend provide a contact high--one wants to drop everything and head straight to a library, so infectious is his enthusiasm. "How many young people will be smitten" by Stendhal's recently, brilliantly retranslated Waterloo-era adventure The Charterhouse of Parma, he writes, "recognizing it as the novel they had always wanted to read... the benchmark for all the other novels they will read in later life." Like a great teacher, Italo Calvino distills a writer's essence in a vivid phrase: money, for instance, serves as "the motive force of Balzac's narrative, the true test of feeling in Dickens; but in Mark Twain money is a game of mirrors, causing vertigo over a void." --Tim Appelo

From the Back Cover:

From the British reviews of Why Read the Classics?

"Calvino has the precious gift of introducing a work of literature so as to make it live for the reader as it does for him. . . . He explains important works of the Western canon in a style of innocent wonder."
        
-- The Times

"Enthusiasm and intelligence: these are the essential qualities of the critic. Calvino, himself a novelist of rare quality, possessed both generously. This is a book to read for itself, either again and in a new way, or for the first time."

-- The Daily Telegraph

"Most of the book gives an implicit answer to the book's title, but the opening essay attempts a direct one, and manages in just over six pages to give one of the most inspiring and least cliché-ridden justifications of great literature I've ever come upon."
        
-- The Sunday Telegraph

"Like any library worthy of its name, Why Read the Classics? is full of temptations. In the person of its whimsical author it offers us the lure of his eclectic bookshelves through which Calvino guides us, pulling out books and reading us choice passages, watching our faces for reactions of astonishment and for the pleasure of learning a few new melodies before we reach the final page."

-- The Observer

"This is a primer of the highest quality on the work of thirty-one classic writers. . . . It's also blissfully free of academic jargon and journalistic glibness, and its erudition is matched by a real, if becomingly unflaunted, passion for literature. It makes you immediately want to read the authors in question."
        
-- The Evening Standard

About this edition

• Publisher: Pantheon
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0679415246
• ISBN 13: 9780679415244
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 288