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The "memos" are lectures on certain literary qualities whose virtues Calvino wished to recommend to the then-approaching millennium. He intended to devote one lecture to each of six qualities: lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, multiplicity, and consistency. Though he completed the first five, he died before writing the last. [2]
During the summer of 1985, Calvino prepared a series of texts on literature for the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures to be delivered at Harvard University in the fall. On September 6, 1985, Calvino suffered a stroke in his villa in Roccamare, where he was preparing for a lecture tour of the United States.
Invisible Cities is an example of Calvino's use of combinatory literature, and shows influences of semiotics and structuralism. In the novel, the reader finds themselves playing a game with the author, wherein they must find the patterns hidden in the book.
The book derives its title from Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium, but Eco also cites Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveler as inspiration because the novel "is concerned with the presence of the reader in the story", which was also the subject of the lectures and book.
Combinatory literature is a type of fiction writing in which the author relies and draws on concepts outside of general writing practices and applies them to the creative process. This method of writing challenges conventional structuralist processes and approaches.
Writing in The New York Times in 1984, Franco Ferrucci noted of Calvino that: "Even early in his career, his rhetorical virtuosity disguised the subtlety and depth of his vision - especially in some of the stories in Marcovaldo, like The City Lost in the Snow, A Saturday of Sun, Sand and Sleep and The Wrong Stop. He writes lightly and jauntily ...
Difficult Loves (Italian: Gli amori difficili) is a 1970 short story collection by Italo Calvino. [1] It concerns love and the difficulty of communication. Some published versions of the English translation by William Weaver omit a number of the stories, and also include other Calvino stories about the Second World War and postwar period, including those from The Crow Comes Last; some of these ...
Kirkus Reviews called the book a "wry, mind-bending delight" and associated its literary mode with Jorge Luis Borges and Italo Calvino. [1] Mark Sanderson of The Guardian called the book original and "a postmodern paradox, something out of nothing" which with its literary references will make almost anyone "feel woefully illiterate - but then that is part of the game".