![]() This is highly unnerving: fortunately, you’re usually too busy laughing to go mad. Reading Calvino, you’re constantly assailed by the notion that he is writing down what you have always known, except that you’ve never thought of it before. Solaris, like Calvino, possesses the power of seeing into the deepest recesses of human minds and then bringing their dreams to life. It is entirely possible that Calvino is not a human being at all, but a planet, something like the planet Solaris of Stanislaw Lem’s great novel. In fact, I should like to postulate the existence of a secret relationship between Calvino and Buñuel, both expatriates living in Paris and scheming the overthrow of All Anyone Holds Sacred – after all, Buñuel’s film The Phantom of Liberty, with its almost infinite sequence of plots which take over the movie, one after the other, with astonishing casualness, is the work of art which most closely resembles If on a winter’s night a traveller. The OAP is vaguely reminiscent of Thomas Pynchon’s underground postal service, the Tristero System, and almost certainly has covert links with Buñuel’s Revolutionary Army of the Infant Jesus, the only comic terrorist organisation in the history of the cinema. In the space of 260 pages, we are given the beginnings of no fewer than ten novels, each of which is a transmogrified avatar of the previous one we also have a more or less fully-developed love story between the above-mentioned You and Ludmilla, the Other Reader plus, for good measure, a conspiracy-theory fiction about a secret society known as the Organisation of Apocryphal Power, run by a fiendish translator named Ermes Marana, whose purpose may or may not be the subversion of fiction itself. If on a winter’s night a traveller distils into a single volume what is perhaps the dominant characteristic of Calvino’s entire output: his protean, metamorphic genius for never doing the same thing twice. One of the difficulties with writing about Italo Calvino is that he has already said about himself just about everything there is to be said. ![]() But now that you think about it, who ever said this author had an unmistakable tone? On the contrary, he is known as an author who changes greatly from one book to the next. ![]() You prepare to recognise the unmistakable tone of the author. At the beginning of Italo Calvino’s first book for six years, an entirely fictional personage named You, the Reader, buys and settles down with a novel which he firmly believes to be the new Calvino.
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