Some authors seem immortal, others sink into oblivion. After a while, what remains? In his monthly series Should I re-read…?, The duty revisits one of these writers with the help of admirers and attentive observers. Today, one of the major figures of Italian literature of the XXe century, Italo Calvino (1923-1985), the man who, from one book to another, took pleasure in blurring the tracks, exploring all styles and above all thwarting the expectations of his readers, who were never quite sure what to expect. And who rejoiced.
In 1981, when the French translation of If by one winter night a traveler (1979), a brilliant exercise in style containing ten beginnings of a novel, the essayist François Ricard had perfectly summed up the singularity of the writer Italo Calvino: “Do you know how to recognize for sure that a book is from the pen of Italo Calvino? Read the first few pages: if it doesn’t sound like anything you’ve read from Calvino before, then you can safely say it’s Calvino. Ricard also affirmed that his work was comparable to God, that is to say “nowhere and everywhere” at the same time.
Others have called Calvino a “pen squirrel”, curious about everything, fascinated by the great epics and folk tales, the neorealist current and science fiction, comics and poetry. Not to mention that he was a rigorous editor, a formidable intellectual (having often crossed swords with Pier Paolo Pasolini), on the side of the Resistance during the Second World War, militant in the Italian Communist Party until the invasion of Hungary in 1956 and, towards the end of his life, fascinated by the eccentricities of the Ouvroir de Littérature Potential (Oulipo).
All-round writer
He who mastered French well enough to nurture complicities with Georges Perec and Jean-Paul Sartre, in addition to taking a keen eye on the French translations of several of his novels, he did not need the guarantee of the Oulipo to compose his own audacity. At the start of his literary career, in step with the misery (material and moral) that reigned in Italy after 1945, his first novels were inspired by the ambient pessimism, his personal experiences during the war (The Spider’s Nest Trails, 1947), quickly succumbing to the pleasures of social and political satire (real estate speculation1957; A scrutineer’s day1963).
However, this “squirrel”, born in Cuba of scientific parents who will quickly return to Italy after his birth, cannot bring himself to dig only one furrow, or to observe the world with the same telescope. According to him, fables say as much, if not more, about the present than many political rallies. This is what made him a real jack-of-all-trades, handling all the instruments within his reach with rare elegance.
His eclecticism, which did not fail to destabilize, was based on a singular spirit, an insatiable curiosity, making him “both a great writer and a great intellectual”, according to Jean-François Chassay, professor in the Department of literature at UQAM for a few more months, on the eve of a well-deserved retirement. Italo Calvino is one of his favorite authors, discovered at the time of his doctoral thesis on Georges Perec, admired since his reading of Si on a winter night a travelerwhich he sums up to a “dazzling”.
For Jean-François Chassay, “it’s probably a little agreed to say of Calvino that he was intelligent, but in addition, in his case, he had a real literary intelligence”. It unfolded in several ways. “He had a great ability to feel his time, even in very allegorical texts, and knew how to wield a biting irony, a sort of distance in his way of thinking about his relationship to the world, to his characters, and to society. »
This analysis is shared by Eugenio Bolongaro, professor of Italian studies at McGill University. His discovery of Italo Calvino dates back to his bachelor’s degree at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. He had one day come across an English translation of Invisible cities (1972) in a bookstore, still and always his favorite book by a writer of whom he is now a specialist. Author of several articles and essays, including Italo Calvino and the Compass of Literature (University of Toronto Press, 2003), the professor also underlines “his unique contribution to the understanding of the world”, all this through works “which show things that can only be seen through literature”. .
Calvino, this enthusiast of Raymond Queneau and of the seminars of the semiologist Roland Barthes – he would spend many years in Paris before his death following a cerebral hemorrhage in 1985 -, liked to draw on all literary sources to better feed his imagination. Hence his fascination for folk legends, delving into the vast corpus of Italian tales to make them better known to his compatriots, and to draw inspiration from them to distill them through his work. Later grouped under the title our ancestorsthis fantastic trilogy (The slain viscount1952; The baron perched, 1957; The Nonexistent Knight1959) is a good illustration of his mastery of allegory.
Italo the explorer
Calvino is also fascinated by travel, even eyeing the adventures of Marco Polo to sign another success: The invisible cities. This cartography of 52 cities of the future, emerging from his teeming imagination, but also taking root in reality, explores the theme of memory. to the point of being inspired by it for the show Citiescreated in 2014.
Follower of a theatrical practice that favors form and objects, Olivier Ducas, for whom If on a winter’s night a traveler was a revelation during his college studies, later saw all the wealth that The invisible cities. “It was not a theatrical adaptation,” he insists. For Calvino, cities are effigies, and like objects, they take on a symbolic value. An element always represents more than one thing; a plastic tree can make a forest appear. »
Olivier Ducas saw in Calvino “a malleable artistic material” thanks to his singularity, a writer “refusing to describe things as the authors of the XIXe century, always looking for the right words… and wishing to do so with as few words as possible”.
This desire for purification finds its explanation in the Italian literary tradition, according to Eugenio Bolongaro. “For Italian writers, the short story is not an isolated text, underlines the specialist. It’s part of a series, a mosaic, and that’s why my students are interested in Calvino. It seems simple and short on the surface, but the more it is discussed, the more nuances my students discover in several of his books, including Palomar (1983), the last published during his lifetime. »
If Calvino was often considered not very affable, more at ease in the world of books, his generosity was overflowing in his work, exploded, one could say. Jean-François Chassay admires the visionary side of his critical texts and his lectures (“Dans Cybernetics and fantasies, written in 1967, he already anticipates the role of machines and software in writing. “), and notes the impossibility of establishing a list of his works, as they are radically different, taking for example cosmicomics (1965). “The narrator is as old as the universe and he describes in a very scientific way the history of galaxies, of dinosaurs, but while being in the order of the fable. »
Nearly 40 years after his death, Calvino still has a lot to say about the present day, according to Eugenio Bolongaro. “He constantly asks the question: in which world do we want to live? To successfully change it, and to act effectively, he is convinced that we must first try to understand it. »