bookrblog

The Baron in the Trees

Sunday, October 4th, 2009 | Italian Literature | No Comments

This is another unusual book by Italo Calvino, but a strangely attractive one; it is all about trees. A young baron sulks at dinner and leaps into a tree, vowing he’ll never come down - and stubbornly, he lives out the rest of his life in the trees, having all sorts of adventures with brigands, love, adventures with refugees, helping the peasants and discovering literature. The book is a celebration of trees, an exploration of a changing time, and a unique spirit. An enjoyable if strange book.

If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller

Friday, September 14th, 2007 | Italian Literature | No Comments

More like books than book, this collection by Italo Calvino parodies books, readers, publishing, ideas and his own works, all at the same time. The Reader picks up his book – discovers in a printing error he’s reading a different book – goes to correct the error at the bookshop, university, publishing house, more and more places, each time being given a completely different book, and each time wanting to read it but being thwarted. He meets a fellow Reader – the Other Reader, Ludmilla – and a cast of other odd characters including writers and ghost-writers and professors and critics – and in the end the Reader, you, finally end the book, even if it’s not the one you started with – although of course it is, because it’s his book.

Invisible Cities

Thursday, July 12th, 2007 | Italian Literature | No Comments

The idea of this book by Italo Calvino is that Marco Polo meets Kublai Khan (and actually they were contemporaries during the 1200s) and describes to him the cities he has visited; cities where the people worship the buckets and pulleys of a well, where everything is underground or high in the air, cities which contain the faces of the dead, or where everything is reflected and so the reflection is more important than the reality. Which is the meaning of these sketches, that the cities are invisible because they’re actually Venice, or not-Venice, or not-the city of the reader.

Definitely reminiscent of Borges, definitely both eerie and beautiful, and the sort of book where occasionally there’ll be an “ah-ha” moment; like the city where the unborn have their memorials and their worshippers like the graveyards of the dead, like the city of signs where only the sign is visible and perhaps there’s nothing there at all.