Italo Calvino

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Hello, Igolo Colvino, nineteen twenty three to nineteen eighty five, was an Italian author of inventive, bedazzling stories with a passionate belief that writing and art could make life better for everyone. Works like invisible cities. Or if on a winter's night a traveller and the science fiction of his cosmic comics have inspired writers and delighted readers in Italian and in translation around the world.

And as for why his stories are fantastical, fabulous, fables, at one step from reality, then perhaps his time with the partisans in World War II and the poverty of the following decade offers some explanation. With me to discuss Italy Colbino, uh Beatrice Seeker, Associate Professor in Italian Studies at UCL. Jennifer Burns, Professor of Italian Studies at the University of Warwick.

and Guido Bonsever, Professor of Italian Cultural History at the University of Oxford. Let's start with you, Guido. How and when did Calvino start out in life? Well, he was born in nineteen twenty three and oddly on the Isle of Cuba. But that that's important because he only spends a year there, but it's important because it tells us something about his parents. They b they were both scientists.

both botanies and indeed they were there because the father was directing a a floricultural centre there on the island. But the following year they came back. And his youth was uh very much in a way determined by the kind of scientific background of his parents.

I remember in his memoirs he wrote about the fact that it was almost um he had to kind of hide away the fact that he had a literary interest because everybody was into science and the the suggested reading was all about scientific knowledge and uh and indeed it took World War Two eventually to kind of get him out of this because indeed even when he went to university, when he was

uh seventeen in nineteen forty, he actually initially chose agricultural science, so following the family tradition, but then World War Two broke out and and that that was uh a kind of a life changer for him in many ways. And uh yeah, the importance of World War Two for Calvino and uh for a lot of young men of his generation is not so much related to the beginning of the war, that is nineteen forty for Italy.

but nineteen forty three, with the collapse of fascism, because at that point Italians uh of his age had to decide basically whether to join the fascist army which had been reorganized by the Nazis. or you know, go up the hills, become a partisan and fight a fight against it. And that's what Calvino did and that's how he emerged. from the war as a kind of militant committed young communist intellectual.

And what the partisans were doing is basically were involved in a sort of guerrilla war, trying to fight against the the Nazi and the fascists, disrupting the the logistic lines and he was indeed i he was involved in a number of armed combat situations and he wrote about it in his first novel. The Path to the Spider's Nest, which came out in 1947. We'll come to that in a second, but Jenny Burns, how did the experience as a partisan in the war, the fascist there, Mussolini?

ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw'n ymwneud â nhw he developed a much more, as we've heard, militant position but He also observed how the resistance was made up of in many ways a bunch of misfits and people who were not necessarily ideologically committed to the cause. People who had in various ways been abandoned or damaged by the experience of of the war so far.

and we're not necessarily following a single and clear ideological line. And this becomes very clear in his first novel, The Path to the Spider's Nest. And I think it it does influence him in the long term in the sense that he is whilst a committed writer and committed to the bettering of ac ymwneud â'r cymdeithasol ac ymwneud â'r cymdeithasol ac ymwneud â'r cymdeithasol ac ymwneud â'r cymdeithasol ac ymwneud â'r cymdeithasol ac ymwneud â'r cymdeithasol ac

styled himself as more perhaps an anarchist rather than a communist and commented that he joined a communist brigade simply because they were the best organized of the the resistance fighters. the path uh to the nest of spiders in nineteen forty seven. Can you tell the listeners something about that?

It's a story which tells the reality of fighting in the resistance, but he disrupts the realism, I'll come back to the point about realism in a second, but he disrupts that by focalizing the novel through the eyes of a child, young ad adolescent Boy called Pin. So we experienced the environment of the resistance through the eyes of this boy whose

trying to become an adult male. So the title comes from from this perspective. The the spiders' nests are something that pin regards as his special secret, so a network of underground tunnels that he's found in the hills in the forest that he sees as the nests of the spiders. He thinks nobody knows about them so he sees that uh this as his power, that he knows where these are and that one day he will share that with someone that will become a friend.

because Pin is an orphan. He has a sister who's a prostitute and whom he despises. So they live alone in a village. He spends much of his time in a bar entertaining the older men. And then, more or less accidentally sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n Felly mae'n ymwneud â'r secret o'r ddysgu'r ddysgu'r ddysgu'r ddysgu'r ddysgu'r ddysgu'r ddysgu'r ddysgu'r ddysgu'r

access to power this pistol that he owns and he chooses to hide that where the spiders' nests are. So by using this somewhat fable like perspective and also some of the the tropes of the adventure novel. Calvino gives a very different take on the resistance novel. But it is also regarded, I mentioned realism as one of the early examples of what later t came to be described as Italian neorealism in literature and also in film.

ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r

everyday Italians after the destruction of the war. Can we develop that, Beatrice? Can we talk about his move away from neo realism and why he gave that up and why he felt he had to give it up? Calvino was really convinced that as as a Marxist and uh he was convinced that his duty as a politically engaged writer was to um tell about the reality a and not of fantasies. So he after writing his first novel he tried to write a second one and he made several attempts

but these attempts uh proved to be more difficult. So at some point while he was uh trying to write this realist novel, he sat down and he thought, Maybe I should just write the novel that uh the fantasy novel that I would like to read instead of the novel that I feel compelled to write as a politically engaged writer. And he wrote this uh the um uh, the Cloven Viscount in just in little over a month. And then he published it in nineteen fifty two.

And the same thing happened with the second fantasy novel, um, which is The Baron in the Trees. I mean The Baron in the Trees is about this um Cosimo Rovasco di Piondo Bidiono. Who uh at twelve decides that he wants to just climb up into a tree and live there his entire life, which is what he actually does. throughout the 1950s Calvino finds out that in fact it's easier for him to talk about social and political reality through a metaphor. So by writing fantastical tales rather than

a realist novel. So this was a trilogy, wasn't it? The Cloven Vicarts you talked about and the uh Yes Barn in the Trees and the then the others a non existent nights, yes. So I mean very briefly the the Cloven Bycount is a is about this character Medard who goes to war and is severely wounded and is basically cut in half. Uh and so there are the two halves that go back home and one is the bad half and one is the good half.

and you know, a series of uh adventures followed. But th the interesting thing there is that Calvino problematizes this dichotomy, which in itself would be rather superficial. So the two halves both praise the fact that being half you pay more attention to others. You have a sense of what the others are rather than, you know, if if you are just one piece, you're you're more limited in a sense. And um non existent knight is basically an armor that goes around but nobody's inside it.

But the real protagonist there is again a young boy or an adolescent. So it's in all the three novels Calvino is interested precisely in in this uh maturing process and the growing up, not in the result.

Thank you. Thank you very much, Guido. Um, can we just pursue this a bit more? He was interested in fables which he collected. He's writing fantasies and fables here, isn't he? Can you develop that? Yes, uh it's quite important to to say that we're talking about the nineteen fifties here, and during those years in parallel Calvino was working on what was actually the first collection in Italian of fairy tales. Italy never had a Brothers Grimm's collection before.

And it w is so German fairy tale. Yes. And so and despite the fact that Italy had this kind of huge and very uh varied and sophisticated regional tradition of fairy tales, nobody had put them together and trying to produce a corpus, a national corpus. So Calvino did that. But what's interesting is that in in introduction to Fiabbe Italiane, which is this collection, he wrote about the importance that fairy tales had for him as a writer.

As and it talks to about them in terms of models, narrative models. they were good examples of how to be extremely succinct and straight to the point and be able to literally reduce to the absolute minimum the narrative uh backbone

but at the same time, you know, enrich it with all sorts of different values. And and and I think we can see this also in the evolution of the the trilogy because If w one reads the Cloven Viscount, it's very close to the to the fairy tale tradition and indeed it's you know, it's been turned into narrative for for children as well. But then there's a sense that once he m he moved to the bar in the trees, th there's a sense that Calvina's trying to kind of find his voice.

and trying to move out of traditional genre and and see what can be done with this sort of fantastical dimension inserted into very detailed historical settings. But then he moved on to the non net extent night and that's a m he an even more experimental novel and and you can see how much now he's moving towards the what we normally call meta fictional dimension, right? Novels about

writing novels. And indeed the the one of the protagonists of the novel is uh Sualtodora who happens to be a nun who's, you know, locked up in a convent writing the stories of the knights which are if you like the narrative part of the the traditional narrative part of the novel. And you can sense that Calvino at that point is moving out of the fairy tale tradition and trying to find a way to combine the fantasy approach with still having a you know strong engagement with contemporary issues.

Thank you very much. And Johnny, it's a bit out of sequence, but let's go for one of his major works, Invisible Cities, 1972. Can you tell us about that? Yes, so Invisible Cities is in many ways a collection of stories and it a text which doesn't exactly inaugurate but certainly uses a form that Calvino will continue to work with which is that of a frame narrative with multiple parts inside. So the invisible cities is what do you mean by frame narrative?

So he's in many ways drawing on traditional forms so in Italian Boccaccio's De Cameron where there's a frame story of a group going up into the hills to escape the plague and telling each other stories. It's the it's similar to the Thousand and One Nights and other sort of traditional stories. Yes, Canterbury Tales exactly as well.

But here what he does is to describe a total of fifty five cities, often described just in a single paragraph, others a couple of pages, all of which have the names of women. And the frame story is that these cities are described by Marco Polo. reporting to Kublai Khan the cities of his empire. So alongside the fifty five stories are chapters which start and end with an italicized section where Marco Polo reports to Kublai Khan what he has seen.

So we have the linear story of the frame narrative and between that this collection of fifty five cities and there's a further structural sort of subtlety which is that there are Yn ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r hyn. So there's an internal structure which complexifies further the structure of the whole work.

and enables readers to read, in a network, to read transversally, as well as following the linear narrative of Marco Polo and Kublai Khan. And the interactions between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan are interesting, very interesting in their own right, in the sense that Um Kublai Khan is getting tired of his oversized, disintegrating, troublesome empire. And whilst his other emissaries are telling him stories of defeats and um rebellions.

Marco Polo yn rhoi cymryd hyn o'r cymrydau sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n sy'n. And in that way we start to understand well, a number of things. It transpires across this linear discussion between Kublakan and Marco Polo that ultimately Marco Polo is actually describing Venice.

ymwneud â llawer o'r ymwneud â llawer o'r ymwneud â llawer o'r ymwneud â llawer o'r ymwneud â llawer Original name of Marco Polo's travels was the the description of the world in a sense in English. And so the act of describing all these cities enables Kublai Khan and Marco Polo and the reader to understand what it is about cities that... ymwneud â'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol a'r cymdeithasol

Beatrice, can you tell us how much he was drawing as his reading as a child? Yes. I mean uh first of all we should remember that he got passionate about literature by reading Kipling's jungle book. And then of course he read Kim, uh Captain Courageous. And he also liked very much as a child um Stevenson's Treasure Island. So this sense of adventure he I mean he kept it and he then transferred it into the trilogy and later Another thing that he got.

from his early readings. Because Calvino wasn't just uh a reader of literature but he was also an avid reader of children's magazines and in particular he read the Corriere dei Piccoli, which which was the children's magazines published by the Corriere della Sera, which is still today one of the major Italian uh newspapers. Rydwydwydwydwydwydwydwydwydwydwydwydwydwyd And there one can see the first examples of a serial narra a series of uh episodes that then make a narrative.

which you know one finds not just in invisible cities as Johnny was saying but also in uh his book Marcovaldo. which is another book that I tha that is uh based on you say series of adventure in the city by this character Marcovaldo, then collected together that together make a book. And also another uh thing that I think uh needs to be mentioned, Calvino after you know, when he was an adolescent was an avid reader of uh a satirical journal that uh whose name was uh Bertoldo.

which was published in Italy From nineteen thirty six to nineteen forty three. And as you can imagine, if you uh were a satirical journal in fascist Italy you had to avoid certain things. So satire could not be directed against political figure or uh Mussolini even less. So the kind of satire that Calvino uh learn from there. was a satire against, for example, bourgeois habits and things that a group of people does.

And this remained with him because Calvino is also a very funny writer. I mean, uh you laugh when you when you uh read Calvino often. So this ability to capture the essence of a character as if it were a caricature, really. So to have exaggerated, grotesque I think came from his early readings. Thank you. Um Jenny, he was known to be relatively shy in public.

but prolific in his work, particularly in essays. Is there any way you can give us a brief global view of these essays? Yes. Um he is extremely prolific from the early stages of his career and throughout to the extent that when he died he was writing a series of lectures rather than essays to be given for the Norton Lectures at Harvard University.

In the early years, his essays are interesting in offering a very clear sort of intellectual biography of a writer, in some ways struggling to understand the role of literature in this environment of an Italy that was being born as a new as a republic for the first time and after the the devastation of fascism and the war. So he's part at that point of a group of intellectuals grappling with the same questions about the role of literature in society. And his essays really animate that.

debate um essays from the the mid fifties onwards. offer different ways of trying to understand how literature can intervene um for social good. But it's clear that he finds that, as we've heard from the the other kinds of writing he was doing at the time, he finds that difficult. So he talks about in an early essay from nineteen fifty five Mae'n ymwneud â'r hynny'n ymwneud â'r hynny'n ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r hyn.

He then starts to Mae'n ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud ymwneud.

There he starts to talk about the outside world being a sea a labyrinth all kinds of metaphors for not really being able to to fathom the outside world from the point of view of of literature and he comes to Some sort of conclusions about what writing can do, but the the sense is that he is withdrawing more and more from a sense that the writer can directly intervene.

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Can we see him inventing and reinventing himself as he developed his writing? Oh absolutely sir. And indeed I remember In uh in in an interview, one of the last interviews he gave to Maria Corte, a literary critic, he mentioned the fact that uh whenever he he finished writing a novel

the first thing he thought uh was how to move away from the the kind of writing, the kind of subject matter that he had addressed in the novel because there was so much he would have liked to say, would have liked to

to write about that had left unwritten. Hence uh no doubt if we look at uh Calvino's literary career from the nineteen forties all the way to the nineteen eighties, there's a sense that we we we also uh give uh but uh uh we have a sense of the development of Italian if not European Western literature throughout those decades and he constantly experimented, it constantly pushed the boundary. And as it was I was saying before in the nineteen fifties.

he he decided to be more experimental and he decided that the time had come to some extent to create a an a a shape of a nov the the novel that should reflect the knowledge that contemporary intellectuals have in the twentieth century, hence moving away from the linear narratives that had been inherited uh throughout the decades and d uh uh in a way trying to represent through a literary form the kind of

How can I say uh perception of the world of the the complication, the multiplicity, the the the difficulty in in we have in defining what the material world is and in in the way in which language can define it. Hence the kind of structures that we mentioned before when talking about uh invisible cities in which instead of having one single linear narrative, we have this kind of archipelago of different uh different text

all kind of united and held together by a frame story, but at the same time very independent from each other. And I think that gets to the core of the Calvino of the nineteen, seventeen and eighties. That is to deliver a view of reality that is much more complicated, much more fragmented than what what we would like it to to to be. Does this include the um importance to him of his time in Paris? Certainly so. In in a way

I mean there's a bio biographical dimension related to his move to Paris in the nineteen sixties because he got married uh to his wife who's Argentinian but at the time was working in Paris as a translator. But at the same time there's no doubt that Calvino wanted uh to in a way move out of the kind of the provincial intellectual debates of Italy in the nineteen fifties, all about neuralism as we were saying before, political commitment.

And he he realized that Paris was in a way the place to be in the nineteen sixties. That that's w where the the there's a lot of revolutionary approaches, innovative approaches approaches not just to literature but to also the branches of uh

culture and uh and indeed as soon as he was there he became a friend of Ron Bart, Gremas, other key intellectuals in Paris and uh and in indeed he became one of them. And there's no doubt that he benefited uh from being in Paris and that that was his way to be in a way at the avant garde of European culture.

Jenny, um Jenny Burns, another of his best known novels, we w won't have time to go through all of them, but this one is particularly striking. The title is If on a winter's night a traveller, what happens after that? Well, good question, yes. So this comes out of the Paris milieu that we've just talked about and the notion of In many ways the balance shifting from the author being responsible for the meaning that is derived from a text to the reader being entirely in charge of

interpreting and drawing meaning from the text and this again is influenced by Roland Barth. Is there any simple way of you e explaining that? Yes. So around this time there starts to be a strong interest in the reader as ultimately the creator of a text because they interpret what the author has produced and the author has no sort of control or dominion of the eventual meaning that is derived from a text.

It doesn't seem to have killed the linear narrative in a novel, does it? No it doesn't. No. It is very much a theory of that time. If on a winter's night a traveller again has a frame story of A reader who It opens saying you're about to start reading the new novel by Italem Italo Calvina if on a winter's night a traveller. So the frame story addresses a reader who then meets also a female reader who are looking to read Calvino's new novel but are repeatedly frustrated in doing that.

Felly mae'r peth yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw'r yw. triggers a very long process through the the linear narrative whereby they keep being frustrated in their readings. But the If on the Winters Night a Traveller is the title of the first

opening of a novel that they read. It then moves along more novel openings that these two readers locate thinking they're eventually finding Calvino's novel and yet find that it isn't. So this takes it allows a number of stories to be begun and to then be left hanging by the author and this allows a number of different genres to be visited, particularly the sort of thriller, the noir And each of these novels has a title which when you put them all together reads

if on a winter's night a traveller and I can't remember every single segment of it. But ultimately it says if they sort of find themselves on a dark night looking into a an abyss or pit or grave, what is the story that is awaiting its ending down there?

Beatrice, can we take Calbino? to his period. How is he relating to the writers 'Cause you're always part of a group, he's part of a cultural group and the forefront of it. How is he relating to them at this moment? I mean while he was in Paris he was part of the so called Ulipo, ouvroire de littérature potentielle, which is like a workshop of potential literature where Rydyn ni'n ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud.

As respect the Italian cultural milieu, I think Calvino He was a a big figure, but he uh he also liked to uh keep his independence in a sense. So um since he um resigned from the Communist Party in nineteen fifty seven, he uh somehow was independent and felt the way the novel was being written then and has that influence continued? Yes. frame narrative the literary p uh offered a new way of looking at how a novel can be built and it certainly was influential with a number of different writers

uh of different generations. At the same time, uh as we said before, the th th that hasn't uh kind of um declared the death of linear narratives which continue to be to be very popular. that after the if you like the the the let's call it the postmodernist generation of which uh Calvino was one of the protagonists, th it's m much more difficult to go back to that traditional type of writing without the knowledge of the artificiality of it all.

and therefore often the capacity to be able to complicate it and make it a little bit more closer to our understanding of reality, which is everything but linear and univocal.

So did it have an effect on the de later development of the novel or was is it something that almost stands alone? I wouldn't say it stands alone. I'd see it more in terms of influential not so much because somebody started to write novels a la Calvino, so to speak, but the it's amazing the number of uh younger writers

or writers of his generation who wrote about the influence that his writing had on them. And for example amongst English speaking authors I can think of here in Britain, Jeanette Winterson, uh Samuel Rashdi they both wrote about how influential Calvino Bon was on them and or in the US we have John Apdike uh Gorvidal, so big names who literally particularly I remember after the death of Calvino came out and said, Well this was a great author which

in a way taught us what could be done with literature as a tool to understand reality. How was that different from the way literature had been used before? I think Calvina is always convinced that the aim of an author should be to try to make language as sophisticated as possible in order to translate as much of the real world, the material world around us, into words. And and in that in that respect, language is an ambiguous tool.

It's a very rich tool but at the same time has to be in in a way perfected. And and so in a way the kind of commitment that Calvino found in the nineteen seventies if before it was a political commitment. In the nineteen seventeen eighties it becomes a commitment of as you w used to say,

uh using language to touch the unwritten world around him. I.e. the the aim of the author uh of an author should be to expand the language and allow language to tap into aspects of reality that had never been turned into words before. Hasn't that been happening before though? I mean Shakespeare used language that had never been used before to turn a reality into into prose or more verse verse than prose.

Yeah, I absolutely. And in a way Calvino was the first one uh we mentioned if on a winter's night at Traveller. and part of one of the themes of that book is about the kind of the cyclical dimension of literature. The fact that after all, indeed it goes back to Arabian Knights, to give give a sense that in a way writers are still going back to the same

kind of main uh kind of subject subject matter and main points. But at the same time what I think makes Calvino's writing original is the fact that this, if you like, philosophical dimension is part of the subject matter of his novels.

Going back to Invisible Cities, for example, you read the dialogue between Kublai Khan and Marco Paolo, and it's a philosophical dialogue. They're talking about the way in which individuals are able to make sense of reality around them, the way in which language is able to convey the reality. around them and hence that kind of philosophical core to me is literally what Calvino brought to twentieth century literature. Where are the women in Calvino's work?

Calvino's work has been endlessly and very beautifully analysed by by readers and critics and academics. A question I think nobody has ever quite asked and certainly not answered is about Calvina and women, which is a very Tricky question, as I mentioned, the invisible cities all have the names of women. women feature in all of his works, but I think it's fair to say that women are mostly the object of the the writers, characters, readers, gays,

and very rarely fully formed as subjects. And if on a winter's night a traveller is a very interesting example because there's a frame story of the reader, male reader who meets a female reader, they end up in a relationship But she really doesn't have quite the agency and independence that the the male reader has.

And I think one striking point is towards the end of the the frame narrative as the male reader is still on the trail of these um multiple truncated novels that he can't find and is in a library. waiting for them to be produced. He watches another reader reading in a particular way and asks about that. That reader talks about his mode of reading. A succession of seven readers in the library explain how they read and why.

none of them are women. All of these readers are men. And there is a sense not um that Calvino is a misogynist by any means, but that he he struggles. Well what's going on then? I think he struggles to articulate a sort of like fully formed female subjectivity.

But I I remember at the time of uh the publication of Ifhone Winters uh Night a Traveller, it was openly criticized by some feminist um critic. And i if I remember well his defence was that because his man, his fiction comes out of of his own self and he doesn't want to try and enter the the the self of another gender and therefore it kind of sticks to his because after all that's the only way it can be it can be genuine.

uh obviously this can be uh can be pro problemized in so many ways in so many ways. But that's the way he felt that in a way the first person narrative of a male character was the one that was closest to his own vision of the world.

Okay, Jenny, we're getting towards the end now, but can you tell the listeners which of his works are most popular around the world today? And where they're most popular, which countries, which places? Yeah, he's been hugely translated, I think, into fifty six languages in total. ac mae'n ei ddweud yn ymwneudol, yn ymwneudol, yn ymwneudol, yn ymwneudol, yn ymwneudol, ac yn ymwneudol, ac yn ymwneudol, ac yn ymwneudol, ac yn ymwneudol.

I think what's interesting here, I mean his his work has been translated and then distributed in countries including Iran, Japan, South Africa, Argentina, Brazil. He has global reach.

But I think two interesting things about the way in which he's been translated are Firstly, we haven't talked about the cosmic comics but this was a collection of stories yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw And I won't go into the stories, but published at that moment in the decade of space exploration, later moon landings, a huge sort of imaginary around science fiction and what was beyond this planet.

the translation of the com cosmic comics into English first established him as a science fiction writer in the US, which is not a title really that he would be recognised as in Italy at that point or now.

but also it meant it took him into a lot of other mewn gwirionedd yn ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r But the other novel that has had, well, two more texts are the ones we've talked about today that are sort of globally known, Invisible Cities, and If On A Winter's Night, A Traveller. Beatrice, and then everybody can come in here'cause we are near the end. It's almost uh forty years since his death.

Why should we be why are people reading him now? He seems so much of his time at the time. I think with Calvino you you have a writer who is a classic, who has become a classic, but at the same time you also have a a writer who changed very much throughout his life. and produce very different kinds of writing. So you have in a sense a classic who was experimental.

Um Calvino uh he was also a great essayist and one of the essays that he wrote uh is entitled Why Read the Classics where he gives various definitions of what a classic is and does. And there are two I mean one of the most famous is perhaps a classic is a work that has never exhausted what it has to say to us. But there's another one that I like very much which says

your classic and and here already in this beginning you see Calvino doesn't give you a model to follow. It gives you an hypothesis that you can follow that you can take or refuse. So y there you have a classic that is open, it's against the norm, it's a it's an anticonformist classic. So this definition that I like very much is uh Your classic is a book to which you cannot remain indifferent.

and which helps you define yourself in relation or even in opposition to it. And I think that Calvin is precisely this. Thank you very much. A last word for anyone? I mean I think there are some specific points and one that goes back to his biography that we talked about that uh growing up in an um with an agronomist as a father and you can read it through his text throughout is an interest in the natural world, the world beyond human animals and particularly in the landscape.

ac yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw. understanding of the relationality between humans but also between humans and what is beyond the human. And sometimes you think he is writing like a scientist, for scientists, and using the the way that they think and the way that they progress their thoughts.

Yes, I think that's right. As Guido was saying before, he can sort of posit an argument and then develop it in a very interesting and sort of intricate way, so there's a philosophical charge to all of his writing, whether that's essays or fictions.

But also I think quite simply as well the precision of his writing, which may or may not come from a a scientific background, but the precision with which he uses language and the more almost kind of the ymwneud â hyn yn ymwneud â hyn yn ymwneud â hyn yn ymwneud â hyn yn ymwneud â hyn yn ymwneud â hyn yn ymwneud â hyn ymwneud â hyn sy'n ymwneud â hyn sy'n ymwneud â hyn

has enduring appeal. I definitely agree. And in a way that's another aspect that is uh peculiar to Calvino that underneath these kind of very crystalline splendid prose. Uh he introduces us to a kind of a labyrinth, uh sort of like kaleidoscopy world. And it is not just for entertainment. It's literally part and parcel of this idea of presenting us with

a view of the world as complicated, as difficult to to decipher and th th this constant attempt by literature and us as rational beings in general to uh to kind of make sense of it. And I think that's a kind of Also call to tolerance that Calvino brings to his literature which I think is universal and hopefully will last for decades to come, i. literature as a way to understand the

the the frailty and the mortality of us as individuals and therefore make us more aware of the frailty of the world and the humanity around us. This all makes him sound sort of deeply serious int and intellectual as Beatrice said earlier his humour also gives him massive appeal, I think, across generations and across languages and cultures. Well thank you very much. Thanks to Jennifer Burns, Beatrice Seeker and Guido Bontaba. Next week.

how and why George I succeeded his distant relative, Queen Anne, when others had much closer family ties. That's a Hanoverian succession. Thank you very much for listening.

And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. What did you not have time to say that you'd like to have said? I mean I like it very much. And perhaps what I would add is um reading suggestions. So if listeners haven't read any uh book by Calvino, I would probably start from the end.

and then go backwards. Um that's another way to approach him instead of, you know, going chronological and starting from the realist novel. But start from the end from uh Mr Palomar uh, which is this um mm you know, it's it's this Mr Palomar who observes the world and in its fragment, in its very little aspect and then go backwards towards if on a winter night, etc. etc. That's the thing that I would add.

Can we go back to the question of women in Calbino's work? What's interesting is that it actually takes me back to Uh I mentioned Jeanette Winterson. And Jeanette Winterson did write uh an article in in nineteen nineteen. It was a it was um it was published in the independent sort of uh weekend. issue and uh each week one author was asked to to talk about a hero, their model as writers and she wrote about Calvina.

and uh she wrote about the crisis she went through after the second novel. The first was rem uh everybody remembers, uh Oranges are not the only fruit, very successful. Then the second was not so successful. And then a friend said, Well, why don't you read Italo Calvino? which she did and apparently it opened a a new window and a new kind of creative spur.

that kinda and indeed if you were to read some of Winters' novels such as The Passion and uh Sex in the Cherry you can certainly see Calvino's sort of shadow looming behind. But what's interesting is that at the end of that article, uh, Janet Winterson said Uh no, he's my hero but if I were to meet him and she was writing after his death, if I had you know, if I had met him before he died, there's one question I would have asked him and which the question was, why or why were you so sort of

not I am narrow minded in when when addressing uh female characters, you know, a sophisticated writer's uh a writer like you. And if I can Uh Uh if I can try and sort of imagine an answer to this, I'll refer to another to a great book on Calvino written by uh a an English medievalist, Katherine Hume, who

again, fell in love with Calvina's fiction, wrote this book called Cog Cogito and Cosmos, which is about the the entire overa of Calvina by Calvina. And what's interesting is that Catherine Hume comes to the this point and that point in in a way is implicit in the title, that the whole of Calvino's novels are are about a cogito, a thinking, a rational mind looking at the cosmos.

And that kind of relates to gender because in so in so many ways that kind of thinking mind is a male mind. And it's because I think of the autobiographical dimension, Calvino, you know, in a way

sees himself looking at the world and Palomar in a way, this kind of last novel he wrote. Again Palomar is sort of an Alterigo, satirical Alterigo of Calvino. And I think perhaps that kind of two dimensional created a a situation whereby uh the you know the the female presence sometimes is part of the kosmos rather than the thinking mind at the very centre and that perhaps it's a limitation.

Yeah, no, I think you shouldn't uh look for female voices or, you know, complex representations in Calvino, but everything else you take it. But this is definitely something that is missing there, yes.

Do any of you have an explanation for this or have you do you think you've covered it by what you've been saying about it? I think there's probably more to say. I mean one is that it's very surprising in how Rydyn ni'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd i'n mynd. yw'n ymwneud â'n ymwneud â'n ymwneud â'n ymwneud â'n ymwneud â'n ymwneud â'n ymwneud â'n ymwneud â'n mynd.

to their work and to their thinking about literature. But it's just interesting that having been a keen observer of Italian society in particular throughout the the forties, fifties, sixties and seventies, he does go quiet in the sixties and seventies, but that's the period of a major feminist movements in Italy and significant change as um a result of the success of those movements and he he really stays stays quiet on that. But I think the other point is that and it's sort of

collections that have been published, particularly a collection called Under the Jaguar Sun, which was designed to be engaging with the five senses. And there he is starting to move from that sort of very prominently um rational um cerebral almost approach to understanding the world to an attention much to more to the embodied. There's something more carnal about those texts and about some of his other writings in the time which suggests that

women more fully, I don't know. Well thank you all very much. It's a total pleasure and I'm completely exhausted. So much. Does someone want tea or coffee? Melvin, tea? Uh tea please. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production. In 1984, an IRA bomb planted under a bath in Brighton's Grand Hotel came close to killing Margaret Thatcher and her cabinet.

It was the biggest direct assault on a British government since the From BBC Radio 4, I'm Glenn Patterson. I tell the story of the deadly attack, unraveling the threads that break the Involved often by heartbreaking chance to that place and time. 2 54 a.m. on the morning of the 12th of October. And I reveal how the police only just averted a follow-up bombing. aimed at England's beaches. To hear the Brighton Bomb and many other great history documentaries, search for the History Podcast on BBC.