Italo Calvino

From what I've read I'd say he definitely has intellectual range...

"If on A Winters Night" is a cozy-cozy comfy book that reminds me of a Levinger catalog. But I love Levinger catalogs (tools for serious readers) and so I like the book. It is an indie-rock book like Sebadoh and Difficult Loves is indie-rock like Magnetic Fields and Cosmicomics like The Pixies and Invisible Cities like mid-period Tortoise. So you know which I like...

thats his best one! that is the best book i have read for millenia

Check here for a essay on topic:
http://www.ninthart.com/display.php?article=277
Here for the pretty web presence: http://www.urbicande.be/
Here for the catalog: www.marsimport.com

But yeah, Invisible Cities and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller rock the house all night long.

I've read some of that comics stuff, and even saw a very nice exhibition around it in Angouleme many years ago. Pretty but basically drivel.

And Martin, why do you think the CotO basically drivel?

Well, I found them in "Baron in the Trees"; it was a highly character-driven story, no? The other one I read about the non-existent knight wasn't, though.

anybody ever read Schuiten and Peeters "Cities of the Obscure?"

I've read the "Ubricante"(?) story about the little cube that kept growing. Wonderful stuff. I really don't understand how Martin could call it "pretty but basically drivel", since it has one of the most original and imaginative plots I've ever seen in a comic book.

no way is barthelme 50 cent

ETHANP23: 'julian barnes has watered down my punk sensibilities and sold them to the masses - james joyce'

this is still pretty funny

no way is barthelme 50 cent

-- max, Thursday, May 8, 2008 12:26 AM (5 minutes ago) Bookmark Link

lol 2003

reading calvino, barthelme, and various collections of mythology and folk tales is making my mind very happy these days.

reading cosmicomics right now - moon cheese sorta grossed me out

max i think we read a lot of the same ish

although i guess it's all like post-college pomo crap so big surprise

yeah we probably do

max will you work on improving your time-to-respond in the oh-ten

btw I finished invisible cities a couple weeks ago

im reading cosmicomics right now hence the bump

cosmicomics is great

fyi to all

what should I read next by italo calvino

^ that is a question, not the name of a book btw

i dunno about you but im gonna reread if on a winters night

edward "the adventure of a photographer" in difficult loves is pretty great

Cosmicomics was amazing the first time but rereading it was vv disappointing. I really like the Baron in the Trees, too. Calvino is a really good storyteller and I think it comes out best in Baron.

i'm curious why the disappointing reread, fetchboy.

I'm not totally sure. It was the first Calvino that I read, and I followed it up fairly quickly with Invisible Cities and I think that I used to sort of conflate my love of the two books and I had this idea of it being this transcendent collection of stories (which is really what invisible cities is). I particularly had fond memories of the mollusk story.
Then when I went back to it all of the stories seemed a lot more gimmicky than I had remembered. I felt like once you expected the abstract premise of each story going into it, it didn't have much.
Maybe it's where I was at in my life when I reread it, but my good friend who originally introduced me to Calvino told me that he had the same experience. Have you or anyone else here revisited it yet?
I loved If On A Winter's Night.. but I'm sort of afraid that going back to it I'd have the same experience. Invisible Cities, on the other hand, gets better with each rereading.

If On A Winter's Night probably does get any better after the first time. Which, for me anyway, was pretty damn good.

If anyone hasn't read his selection/collection of Italian Folk Tales I would strongly recommend that you do so.

^^^argh, IOAWN probably does NOT get any better...it should say.

Maybe not, but you could always have fun looking at the diagram he drew and reading about how he wrote it in Oulipo Laboratory.

cosmicomics was my introduction also, and i've been thinking of a reread. loved invisible cities. started IOAWN but got bogged down and haven't picked it back up lately.

Then when I went back to it all of the stories seemed a lot more gimmicky than I had remembered. I felt like once you expected the abstract premise of each story going into it, it didn't have much.

ive only read it once but i couldnt disagree more! i was wary that the way each had some premise would feel gimmicky--but it never did for me. for one thing, i think calvino is an excellent prose stylist, and im willing to read him even if the concepts are one-note... but more importantly i thought each story was beautifully structured in the way it would layer new ideas and meanings on top of the first, most basic thought.

im thinking for example of the one about putting the sign in the universe--and then how on each successive rotation, the concept of sign would be folded over, reexamined, etc, with the removal of the sign, the duplication of the sign, the ruptures in space.

max, have you read Marcovaldo? or Baron in the Trees? those are prob my faves. and Invis Cities.

nah ive only read cosmicomics winters night and invisible cities. cosmicomics is my favorite of the thread. i dont own any others but maybe ill go to the libe later

max, have you read Marcovaldo? or Baron in the Trees? those are prob my faves
Mine too. My favorite story in cosmicomics was the one about the dinosaur, but it some point after reading a bunch of Calvino books some kind of fatigue sets in which max seems to be immune to. Good for him.

lol when I first read cosmicomics I was expecting some crazy shit and the first story was just about fuckin

I mean it was all crazy shit but all of the stories were all super simple, on the whole. Baron's my fav Calvino

calvino vs. borges vs. cortazar

james im only reading two in a row!

i read invisible cities last year. and if on a winters night in high school.

Having never read him but known the name, I saw that The Complete Cosmicomics had been added to the UCI library collection and so I gave it a go. Really enjoyable, reminded me of both Lem and Lessing among others. The garrulousness of Qfwfq in all his incarnations was key, a character in constantly different shapes.

"cosmicomics" is possibly my favorite word ever coined. it's also the only calvino i've read and i really liked it--i read about half of winters night but i guess i found it to be boringly gimmicky at the time (though i see upthread cosmicomics being called out for the same, which is totally understandable. i guess i just have a weakness for that super-abstract space-and-time aesthetic)

http://www.newstatesman.com/culture/art-and-design/2013/05/what-we-learn-when-we-read-italo-calvino%E2%80%99s-letters