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Title: Six Memos for the Next Millennium

Author: Geoffrey Brock - translator, Italo Calvino

Narrator: Edoardo Ballerini

Format: Unabridged

Length: 3 hrs and 34 mins

Language: English

Release date: 08-04-17

Publisher: Recorded Books

Ratings: 5 of 5 out of 4 votes

Genres: Nonfiction, Philosophy

Publisher's Summary:

At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness, exactitude, visibility, and multiplicity, drawing examples from his vast knowledge of myth, folklore, and works both ancient and modern.

Members Reviews:

Calvino manifesto

This book is a collection of talks on writing Calvino was preparing as a series of documents specifying some important keys of literature that he felt needed to be recorded as crucial elements of literary tradition. Indeed, in his essay "Visibility," Calvino brings up his concern for the future of imagination and literature in a world so full of prefabricated imagery, where images are provided rather than solicited. While his initial impulse was to write six lectures, he evidently reported at one point of his process that he had ideas for eight, but in the end he only completed five. In her introduction, Esther Calvino clarifies that she decided to keep the title true to Italo's original intention and publish the series under the original title, despite the missing sixth.

In the lectures themselves, Calvino provides the kind of insight and fascination with the making of literature that fuels so many of his best books. Rather than come across as a manifesto of his own brilliance, as the premise may sound, Calvino spends a lot of time in admiration of the work of other writers, from classics like Ovid and Dante to colleagues and contemporaries, like Francis Perec and Douglas R. Hofstadter. The lectures are of course sometimes punctuated with personal details about his own writing processes, but I found them very inviting and revealing about the ideas he was trying to point out.

Each lecture dedicates itself to an aspect of literature that Calvino finds crucial: "Lightness," or the aspect of language that speaks directly to a reader and is not always weighed down with intellectual metaphor but with direct communication; "Quickness," or the immediacy of literature - the way it cuts through random detail to get to the necessary; "Exactitude," or the precision of language (and when it needs imprecision); "Visibility," or the power of imagery to convey ideas; and "Multiplicity," or the complexity of content.

Calvino is a writer who has always presented a kind of fascinating enigma. His works is spectacularly visual, and while crucially uncategorizable in its sense of being not easy to nail down in the area of metaphor or theme (something that Calvino no doubt worked quite strenuously at, clear when he talks about a poem's meaning in "Exactitude" as being "not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into mineral immobility, but alive as an organism"), it is also quite accessible and always an enjoyable read. Calvino mastered the art of experimentalism that did not read as though one needed to be schooled in the traditions of literature to understand his intents.