Italo Calvino is the author of Invisible Cities (Città Invisibili) and If On A Winter's Night A Traveler.

Calvino

"The struggle of literature is in fact a struggle to escape from the confines of language; it stretches out from the utmost limits of what can be said; what stirs literature is the call and attraction of what is not in the dictionary."

"It makes me very happy when someone is able to find a philosophy from the productions of my mind which has little philosophy." Italo Calvino.

"I can think of no finer writer to have beside me while Italy explodes, while Britain burns, while the world ends." Salman Rushdie.

The great Italian writer Italo Calvino stands high among the masters of modern narrative. Invisible Cities remains his most remarkable work, terrifying in its conceits, precise and economic in its means. It is not a novel at all but the delicious work of a true fictionist. Invisible Cities is a meditation on desire and memory as the generators and motors of realities. It is a work of imaginative fiction, kaleidoscopic, visionary, oneiric, enigmatic, fragmentary. Like all literature that is worth reading and remembering, it is sceptical and subversive.

Calvino's writing occurs at the crossroads of dream within dream, where desire activates the strands of memory and where those strands interweave themselves into the magic tissue of personal identity. His sentences float like reflections on moving water, declining the comfort of determinate meanings, a literary analogue of the principle of uncertainty. His writing enacts the unending chess game between chance and chaos played out at the crossroads where the players are dreaming the same dream in which an infinite chess game is under way according to rules which have yet to be determined.

The 'what might have been' recurs throughout Calvino's fiction undermining all certainties and questioning language itself, the possibility of words to decipher the images / signs of reality. Thus "signs form a language, but not the one you think you know." *

"Marco enters a city; he sees someone in a square living a life or an instant that could be his; he could now be in that man's place, if he had stopped in time, long ago; or if, long ago, at a crossroads, instead of taking one road he had taken the opposite one ... something that had been a possible future of his and is now someone else's present. Futures not achieved are only branches of the past: dead branches." *

Sometimes the reader is reminded of Borges but the light grace of Calvino's unaffected style lifts him clear.

"With cities, it is as with dreams: everything imaginable can be dreamed, but even the most unexpected dream is a rebus that conceals a desire or, its reverse, a fear." *

Italo Calvino died in 1985.

*Extracts from William Weaver's translation of Cittá Invisibili © Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc. 1974.

Recommended reading:
Understanding Italo Calvino by Bruno Weiss, 1993.
Calvino's Fictions by Kathryn Hume, 1992.
Italo Calvino by Albert Howard Carter, 1987.