Collected Works of Italo Calvino

Author: [Italy] Italo Calvino
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2001-09-01
Features: The volume includes If on a winter's night a traveler published in 1979; Palomar, published in 1983, is Calvino's last novel; and American Lectures, also known as "Six Suggestions for the Year After," were lectures Calvino prepared for the Norton Lectures at Harvard University in the United States, written in 1985, but left unfinished due to the author's sudden death. Calvino's If on a winter's night a traveler, written in 1979, can be seen as a "novel about novels, literature about literature." In its over 100,000 words, Calvino lays traps everywhere: plot traps, philosophical traps, and investigative traps. It follows the story of a man and a woman who meet, know, and fall in love after exchanging a wrongly bound copy of If on a winter's night a traveler, while blending fragments of ten different novels by various authors, deliberately creating a maze-like reading experience. Even the author himself appears as a character in the novel, moving up and down, making the reading of the novel feel more like participating in a linguistic intellectual game. Unlike computer games, it must be completed entirely within a completely imaginative world.