The Road to San Giovanni

Fülszöveg

nublished for the first time in iv' English, The Road to San Giovanni is the best introduction to Italo Calvino. This major testament by an essential writer of the twentieth century is comprised of five strikingly elegant "memory exercises" about his life and work.
"The Road to San Giovanni" poignantly evokes Calvino's childhood home, "on the last slopes at the foot of San Pietro hill, as though at the border between two continents." "A Cinema-Goer's Autobiography" gives a mesmerizing account of the years of Calvino's adolescence, when he attended the cinema "almost every day and maybe even twice a day," riveted by such films as Lives of a Bengal Lancer with Gary Cooper and Mutiny on the Bounty with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable. "Memories of a Battle" sharply focuses on his experience fighting the Fascists during World War II but becomes in turn a deeply affecting reflection on the role of real and imagined memories. "La Poubelle Agre'eV is a Parisian set-piece and "From the... Tovább

Fülszöveg

nublished for the first time in iv' English, The Road to San Giovanni is the best introduction to Italo Calvino. This major testament by an essential writer of the twentieth century is comprised of five strikingly elegant "memory exercises" about his life and work.
"The Road to San Giovanni" poignantly evokes Calvino's childhood home, "on the last slopes at the foot of San Pietro hill, as though at the border between two continents." "A Cinema-Goer's Autobiography" gives a mesmerizing account of the years of Calvino's adolescence, when he attended the cinema "almost every day and maybe even twice a day," riveted by such films as Lives of a Bengal Lancer with Gary Cooper and Mutiny on the Bounty with Charles Laughton and Clark Gable. "Memories of a Battle" sharply focuses on his experience fighting the Fascists during World War II but becomes in turn a deeply affecting reflection on the role of real and imagined memories. "La Poubelle Agre'eV is a Parisian set-piece and "From the Opaque" is essentially his writer's credo.
In The Road to San Giovanni, brilliantly translated by Tim Parks, the originality, grace, wit, and
wisdom tiiat wc have come to associate with Calvino are everywhere on display.
italo Calvin o's works include The Baron in the Trees, Cosmicornics, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, Invisible Cities, Marcovaldo, Mr. Palomar, Six Memosfor the Next Millenninm, and Under the Jaguar Sun. Calvino died in 1985.
Tim Parks has translated works by Alberto Moravia and Roberto Calasso. He is the author of six novels and, most recently, Italian Neighbors, a work of non-fiction.
Jacket illustration by Julia Noonan
Jacket design by Marjorie Anderson
r
PANTHEON BOOKS, NEW YORK 9/93 Printed in the U.S.A. ©1993 Random House, Inc.
"Like Jorge Luis Borges and Gabriel García Márquez,
Italo Calvino dreams perfect dreams for us____Of the
three, Calvino is the sunniest, the most variously and benignly curious about the human truth."
— John Updike
"Calvino possesses the power of seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds and then bringing their dreams to life."
— Salman Rushdie Vissza