Product Description

Italo Calvino was due to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1985-86, but they were left unfinished at his death. The surviving drafts explore of the concepts of Lightness, Quickness, Multiplicity, Exactitude and Visibility (Constancy was to be the sixth) in serious yet playful essays that reveal Calvino's debt to the comic strip and the folktale. With his customary imagination and grace, he sought to define the virtues of the great literature of the past in order to shape the values of the future. This collection is a brilliant précis of the work of a great writer whose legacy will endure through the millennium he addressed.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31948 in Books
• Published on: 2009-05-28
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 128 pages

Review
'Calvino will continue to glitter, this strange, lonely prospector in the universe of words, well into the next millennium and after, a master in the empire of the imagination' - Ian Thomson, Independent on Sunday '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 'A rather wonderful little book, full of wit and erudition' Daily Telegraph

Ian Thomson, Independent on Sunday
‘Calvino will continue to glitter... well into the next millennium and after, a master in the empire of the imagination'

Peter Kemp, Sunday Times
‘As commentary on fiction's strategies and possibilities, the book is alive with stimulating suggestivity…exhilarating and poignant'

Customer Reviews

An intelligent, witty, compelling and persuasive collection
It isn't often that you find a writer whose literature you enjoy and whose non-fiction writing is even more enjoyable. Calvino is one such writer for me. His Memos for the next millenium are his collection of musings on what makes great literature great and the skills that he aspired to holding as a writer, as well as those skills that he admired in other writers. For the student of literature and for would be writers everywhere this is an intelligent, witty, compelling and persuasive collection of lectures. Would be that all criticism were so balanced, informative and instructive as Calvino's.

A prophecy rapidly coming true
Calvino was of the last generation before the so-called 'information revolution', and the Six Memos came at the end of his life, just at the exact moment that the effects of this revolution were beginning to be felt. In this book he sets out an agenda for the importance of specific qualities of literature in the future. As we run around in circles in a society obsessed with globalism (the Internet and all its trappings, economics, and general short-termism) this agenda takes on a great deal of importance. This is not a 'fun read' as such, but if you believe in literature, then ignore this at your peril!

A Guidebook for Artists of Every Discipline
Calvino offers us a bag of jewels with these five essays on the principle qualities that will carry great writing into the next century. The lessons learned from "Lightness," "Quickness," "Exactitude," "Visibility," and "Multiplicity" can be applied in any creative situation. They add strength to my own compositional efforts, but even more, the multi-faceted richness of Calvino's prose and Creagh's translation is something to savor and rejoice in. Even in his essays, Calvino is a storyteller, and as always his characters are the moods and motives of the people at large, as well as simply people themselves. Whether this is your first or fiftieth time reading this little book, the rush of inspiration that will sweep over you is not to be stemmed. Buy it, read it, write in it, draw lines and circle your favorite words and sentences. This is a book to imprint into your mind.