Six Memos for the Next Millennium
Italo Calvino
Italo Calvino cast his lofty thoughts toward the pending millennium long before the rest of us. Now that the zeitgeist has caught up with him, it seems a good time to revisit his Six Memos for the Next Millennium, an investigation into the literary values that he wished to bequeath to future generations. Calvino, the author of Invisible Cities, If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, and other postmodern fictional works, was to deliver these five "memos" (there was to be a sixth) as Harvard's Charles Eliot Norton Lectures in 1985-86, but he died before doing so. These lectures are dense, rigorous, and seemingly full of contradiction. The first is a paean to lightness (though "light like a bird," as Paul Valéry wrote, "and not like a feather"). Lightness is followed by quickness (without "presum[ing] to deny the pleasures of lingering"), exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity. The perfect antidote to writerly laziness. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Publication Year: 1988
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This collection of six lectures, prepared toward the end of novelist Calvino's life and summarizing his theory of literature, will be of particular interest to fans of Calvino's work. Those with an academic interest in postwar literature will also find these lectures fascinating. I imagine that the average reader of airport thrillers (one of my favorite genres) will not be similarly entranced.
Calvino's six lectures encompass his thoughts on lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, insofar as they apply to literature. As one of postmodernism's leading lights, his insights are invaluable and his lectures written with clarity and passion.
Why only three stars? Well, I found that this book spoke more to my head than to my heart. Furthermore, this book feels very much of its time and place: while Calvino references some writers with whom I'm familiar, such as Dante and Balzac, he references many more who are strangers to me. It's hard to follow an argument whose references are alien to one's own experience.
Nevertheless, I'll file this one under "eating my vegetables" and happily pass it along. 'Six Memos for the Next Millenium' helped me understand one of the great writers of the Twentieth Century. For this alone, it was worth reading.
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