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Ingenuous and Not at All Austere: A Profile of Italo Calvino |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / WRITERS AND WRITING |
| Author: Linda Simon |
| Publication: The world & I online |
| Issue Date: 1/1/2001 |
| Size: 2,230 Words, 13,754 Characters |
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Beginning his career in the political and social volatility of postwar Italy, Italo Calvino, like many of his European contemporaries, questioned the meaning of literature and the role of the writer in a world that seemed increasingly to deny the significance of literary works. With science, social science, and assorted flavors of critical theory competing for the reader's attention, fiction writers were compelled to ask, as Calvino did: "Who do we write a novel for?" His reply echoed the sentiments of many modernist and postmodernist writers: "We will write novels," he said, "for a reader who has finally understood that he no longer has to read novels." For such readers, the writer needs to be more than a storyteller, more than an educator, more than a creator of pretty or entertaining di...
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... the most fitting epithet for Calvino is the words he himself used in admiration of Nobel Prize--winning poet Eugenio Montale, a writer, Calvino said, whose power "has always lain in keeping his voice low, without emphasis of any kind, using modest and doubtful tones. It is precisely for this reason that he has made himself heard to many. ... This is how literature tunnels its way forward."
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